[23] There is a falling off in #C#, #E#, with the wives sewing their silken seams and rocking the cradle, and in #B#, waiting with their babies in their hands, till in #M# the ladies, still so called, are reduced to fishers' wives, "wi their gown-tails owre their crown!" [24] The reading in #I# 9, "To Noroway, wi our king's daughter," has been treated as if important. This version, says Buchan, was taken down from the recitation of "'a wight of Homer's craft,' who, as a wandering minstrel, blind from his infancy, has been travelling in the North as a mendicant for these last fifty years. He learned it in his youth from a very old person." The mendicant was, no doubt, James Rankin, "the blind beggar whom I kept travelling through Scotland, collecting ballads for me, at a heavy expense" (frontispiece to Buchan's MSS, vol. i.). A large part of Buchan's ballads have the mint-mark of this minstrel beggar and beggarly minstrel, who collected for pay. No confidence can be placed in any of his readings: his personal inspiration was too decided to make him a safe reporter. [25] For consistency's sake, it has here been dropped from the place where it first occurs, after stanza 4. [26] Or a pure accident. Wyntoun says that Margaret sailed the 12th of August. Motherwell found, "from a laborious calculation," that the 12th of August, 1282 (a misprint, I suppose, for 1281), was a Monday, the sailing day in #G# 5. The account in #H# is probably taken from #G#. [27] Fordun, ed. Skene, I, 307. [28] Scalacronica, ed. Stevenson, p. 110. Fordun mentions Michael of Wemyss and Michael Scot as the envoys, I, 311. [29] He was not even that, according to #G# 4, which has the silly reading, For I was never a good seaman, Nor ever intend to be. So in a mixed ballad which will be put with 'Young Allan.' [30] I have not felt called upon to say anything of the attempt of the late Mr Robert Chambers to prove 'Sir Patrick Spens', a piece of literary work of the last century, by arguments which would make Lady Wardlaw author not only of most of the romantic Scottish ballads, but also of a good part of the ballads of Europe. The flimsy plea of Mr Chambers has been effectually disposed of by Mr Norval Clyne, The Romantic Scottish Ballads and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy, Aberdeen, 1859, and by Mr James Hutton Watkins, Early Scottish Ballads, Glasgow, 1867. 59 SIR ALDINGAR #A.# 'Sir Aldingar,' Percy MS., p. 68; Hales and Furnivall, I, 166. #B.# 'Sir Hugh le Blond,' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, III, 51, 1803. #C.# 'Sir Hugh le Blond,' Dr Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, January 1, 1830, p. 6.