In the mean time, Katharine, on hearing the loud notes of the song, had returned within the door to listen, and heard the most part of the lines and names distinctly. She had heard it once before, and the singer reported it to be a new song, and the composition of a young man who had afterwards been executed in the Grass–Market. How Nanny came to sing such a song, with so much seeming zest, after the violent prelatic principles which she had so lately avowed, the maid could not well comprehend, and she began to suspect that there was more in Nanny’s mind than had yet been made manifest. Struck with this thought, and ruminating upon it, she continued standing in the same position, and heard Nanny sometimes crooning, and at other times talking rapidly and fervently to herself. After much incoherent matter, lines of psalms, &c. Katharine heard with astonishment the following questions and answers, in which two distinct voices were imitated:— “Were you at the meeting of the traitors at Lanark on the 12th of January?” “I never was amang traitors that I was certain of till this day—Let them take that! bloody fruesome beasts.” “Were you at Lanark on that day?” “If you had been there you would have seen.” “D‑‑n the old b‑‑! Burn her with matches—squeeze her with pincers as long as there’s a whole piece of her together—then throw her into prison, and let her lie till she rot—the old wrinkled hag of h‑‑! Good woman, I pity you; you shall yet go free if you will tell us where you last saw Hamilton and your own goodman.” “Ye sall hing me up by the tongue first, and cut me a’ in collops while I’m hingin.” “Burn her in the cheek, cut baith her lugs out, and let her gae to h‑‑ her own way.” After this strange soliloquy, the speaker sobbed aloud, spoke in a suppressed voice for some time, and then began a strain so sweet and melancholy, that it thrilled the hearer, and made her tremble where she stood. The tune was something like the Broom of Cowdenknows, the sweetest and most plaintive of the ancient Scottish airs; but it was sung so slow, as to bear with it a kind of solemnity. “The kye are rowting in the lone, The ewes bleat on the brae, O, what can ail my auld gudeman, He bides sae lang away! An’ aye the Robin sang by the wud, An’ his note had a waesome fa’; An’ the corbie croupit in the clud, But he durstna light ava; Till out cam the wee grey moudiwort Frae neath the hollow stane, An’ it howkit a grave for the auld grey head, For the head lay a’ its lane! But I will seek out the Robin’s nest, An’ the nest of the ouzel shy, For the siller hair that is beddit there Maun wave aboon the sky.”