A Southern ballad has something of the outline of the English and Norse, and sounds like a thin echo of them. #A.# Poésies populaires de la France, MS., III, fol. 158, Burgundy. #B.# Buchon, Noëls et Chants p. de la Franche-Comté, p. 90, No 31, 'J'ai fait un rêve.' #C.# Beaurepaire, La Poésie p. en Normandie, p. 50. #D.# Ampère, Instructions, p. 34, Bretagne. #E.# Guillon, Chansons p. de l'Ain, p. 161, 'Chante, rossignolet.' #F.# Arbaud, Chants p. de la Provence, II, 139, 'Lou premier Jour de Mai.' #G.# Ferraro, Canti p. monferrini, p. 8, No 7, 'Il primo amore.' A youth is obliged by his father to give up his love for a bride who is less beautiful but richer. He has a dream that his love is dead, and carries her a rose, #B#, #D#. He invites her to the wedding: she will not come to the ceremony, but to the dance. She has three gowns made for the occasion, the third embroidered with gold, or of gold stuff. She falls dead while dancing: she falls on the right, he on the left. In #G#, after his love has died, the bridegroom draws his sword and kills himself. #C# and one copy of #D# have the phenomenon of the sympathetic plants, as in English #A#, #B#, #E#, #F#, #G#. #E# 3 is a sort of commonplace when unequal matches are in question. So in a fragment in Herd's manuscripts, I, 55, II, 187: 'I hae nae houses, I hae nae lands, I hae nae gowd or fee, Sir; I am oer low to be your bryde, Your loon I'll never be, Sir.' And again Motherwell's MS., p. 37. It is Lady Grey's answer to King Edward in the Third Part of Henry VI, III, 2: 'I know I am too mean to be your queen, And yet too good to be your concubine.' So Crescentia, the Koloczaer Codex, Mailáth u. Köffinger, p. 260, v. 565 ff. With regard to #B# 20, 'I'll na put on the dowie green,' Kinloch remarks that green is considered unfortunate in love matters, the couplet running, Green is love deen, Yellow's forsaken; whereas blue is looked upon as a most fortunate color: "blue is love true." "To be married in a green colored dress is ominous of misfortune, for according to the proverb: They that marry in green, Their sorrow is soon seen. And no young woman in the North would wear that color on her wedding day. An old lady of my acquaintance, whose marriage had proved unfortunate, used seriously to warn young women to beware of being married in green, for she attributed her own misfortunes solely to her having been married in a green gown, which she had put on contrary to the sage advice of her seniors, in whose minds the belief was more firmly rooted, and who had wished her to wear in its stead a blue dress, as being the more lucky color. To dance in green stockings is a proverbial phrase applied to an elder sister when the younger is first married, intimating that she may mourn her hapless fate, as she has now no chance of being married. To dream of green is believed to be the presage of misfortune." Kinloch MSS, I, 15 f.