In haste he consults mother and brother whether he should marry the 'Nut-brown Maid, and let Fair Annet be,' and so long as they praise the tochered lass he scorns their counsel; he will not have 'a fat fadge by the fire.' But when his sister puts in a word for Annet his resentment blazes up anew; he will marry her dusky rival in despite. With a heart not less hot, we may be sure, his forsaken love dons her gayest robes, and at St. Mary's Kirk she casts the poor brown bride into the shade in dress as well as in looks. Small wonder if the bride speaks out with spite when her bridegroom reaches across her to lay a red rose on Annet's knee. The words between the two angry women are like rapier-thrusts, keen and aimed at the heart. 'Where did ye get the rose-water that maks your skin so white?' asks the bride; and when Annet's swift retort goes home, she can only respond with the long bodkin drawn from her hair. The word in jest costs the lives of three. Fair Janet's is another tragic wedding; love, and jealousy, and guilt again hold tryst in the little kirk whose grey walls are scarce to be traced on the green platform above the loch. 'I 've seen other days,' says the pale bride to her lost lover as he dances with her bridesmaiden: '"I 've seen other days wi' you, Willie, And so hae mony mae; Ye would hae danced wi' me yoursel' And let a' ithers gae"'; and, dancing, she drops dead. Fasting, and fire, and sickness unto death were, however, tame ordeals compared with those which 'Burd Helen' came through, as they are described in the ballad Professor Child holds, not without reason, to have 'perhaps no superior' in our own or any other tongue. Patient Grizel, herself the incarnation in literary form of a type of woman's faithfulness and meek endurance of wrong that had floated long in mediaeval tradition, might have shrunk from some of the cruel tasks which Lord Thomas--the 'Child Waters' of the favourite English variant--lays upon the mother of his unborn child--the woman whose self-surrender had been so complete that she has not the blessing of Holy Church and the support of wifely vows to comfort her in her hour of trial. All the summer day she runs by his bridle-rein until they come to the Water of Clyde, which 'Sweet Willie and May Margaret' also sought to ford on a similar errand: 'And he was never so courteous a knight, As stand and bid her ride; And she was never so poor a may, As ask him for to bide.' She stables his steed; she waits humbly at table as the little page-boy; she listens, her colour coming and going, to the mother's scorns and the young sister's naive questions. But never, until the supreme moment of her distress, does she draw one sign of pity or relenting from her harsh lord. Then, indeed, love and remorse, as if they had been dammed back, break forth like a flood, that bursts the very door, and makes it 'in flinders flee.' And because