#a#, 'Willie's Lady,' was No 1 in the manuscript of fifteen ballads furnished William Tytler by Mrs Brown in 1783, and having been written down a little later than #b# may be regarded as a revised copy. This manuscript, as remarked under No 5, is not now in the possession of the Fraser-Tytler family, having often been most liberally lent, and, probably, at last not returned. But a transcript had been made by the grandfather of the present family of two of the pieces contained in it, and 'Willie's Lady' is one of these two. Lewis had access to William Tytler's copy, and, having regulated the rhymes, filled out a gap, dropped the passage about the girdle, and made other changes to his taste, printed the ballad in 1801 as No 56 of his Tales of Wonder. The next year Scott gave the "ancient copy, never before published," "in its native simplicity, as taken from Mrs Brown of Falkland's MS.,"--William Tytler's,--in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 27, but not with literal accuracy. Jamieson, in 1806, gave 'Sweet Willy,' almost exactly according to the text of his Brown manuscript, in an appendix to the second volume of his collection, p. 367, and at p. 175 of the same volume, a reconstruction of the ballad which might have been spared. #b# lacks altogether the passage which makes proffer of the cup, #a#, stanzas 5-11, and substitutes at that place the girdle of #a# 21-28. The woodbine in #a# 36, 41, is also wanting, and the concluding stanza. A deficiency both in matter and rhyme at #a# 32, is supplied by #b# 25, 26, but not happily: 'An do you to your mither then, An bid her come to your boy's christnen; 'For dear's the boy he's been to you: Then notice well what she shall do.' Again, the transition in #a#, from st. 33 to st. 34, is abrupt even for a ballad, and #b# introduces here four stanzas narrating the execution of the Billy Blind's injunctions, and ending, And notic'd well what she did say, whereby we are prepared for the witch's exclamations.[102] Danish versions of this ballad are numerous: #A-I#, 'Hustru og Mands Moder' ['Fostermoder,' 'Stifmoder'], Grundtvig, No 84, II, 404 ff; #J-T#, 'Hustru og Mands Moder,' Kristensen, II, 111 ff, No 35: #U-X#,'Barselkvinden,' Kristensen, I, 201 ff, No 74; #Y#, 'Hustru og Slegfred,' Grundtvig, No 85, II, 448 ff: in all twenty-five, but many of Kristensen's copies are fragments. Grundtvig's 84 #A#, #B#, and 85 #a# are from manuscripts of the sixteenth century. 84 #F-I# and several repetitions of 85 are of the seventeenth. Grundtvig's 84 #C#, #D#, #E#, and all Kristensen's versions, are from recent oral tradition. Some of these, though taken down since 1870, are wonderfully well preserved.