#A#, as sung, had a sequel of six stanzas, which is found separately and seems to belong with another ballad, 'The Wife of Usher's Well.' Robert Chambers combined #A# with Buchan's version, #C#, and the six concluding stanzas with 'The Wife of Usher's Well,' and divided his ballad into two parts, "on account of the great superiority of what follows over what goes before, and because the latter portion is in a great measure independent of the other:" The Scottish Ballads, pp 345-50. His second reason for a division is better than his first. It is quite according to precedent for a ballad to end with a vow like that in #A# 17, #D# 14: see 'Clerk Saunders.' #D# has some amusing dashes of prose, evidently of masculine origin: "They thought their father's service mean, their mother's no great affair," 2; "When he was certain of the fact, an angry man was he," 6; "That I may ride to fair Berwick, and see what can be done," 8. We have here a strong contrast with both the blind-beggar and the housemaid style of corruption; something suggesting the attorney's clerk rather than the clerk of Owsenford, but at least not mawkish. There are ballads both in Northern and in Southern Europe which have a certain amount of likeness with 'The Clerk's Twa Sons,' but if the story of all derives from one original, time has introduced great and even unusual variations. In the Scottish ballad two youths go to Paris to study, and have an amour with the mayor's daughters, for which they are thrown into prison and condemned to be hanged. The Clerk, their father, comes to the prison, asks them what is their offence, and learns that it is a little dear bought love. He offers the mayor a ransom for their lives, and is sternly refused. The mayor's two daughters beg for their true-love's lives with the same bad success. The students are hanged, and the father goes home to tell his wife that they are put to a higher school. She, #A# [he, #D#], vows to pass the rest of her days in penance and grief. A very well known German ballad, found also in the Low Countries and in Scandinavia, has the following story.[111] A youth is lying in a dungeon, condemned to be hanged. His father comes to the town, and they exchange words about the severity of his prison. The father then goes to the lord of the place and offers three hundred florins as a ransom. Ransom is refused: the boy has a gold chain on his neck which will be his death. The father says that the chain was not stolen, but the gift of a young lady, who reared the boy as a page, or what not. There is no dear bought love in the case. The father, standing by the gallows, threatens revenge, but his son deprecates that: he cares not so much for his life as for his mother's grief. Within a bare half year, more than three hundred men pay with their lives for the death of the boy.[112]