The pair now ride off together, and when she is set in her saddle, no bird in bush or on briar ever sang so sweet as she, #B#, #C#, #E#, #F#, #H#, #I#. If we were to trust some of those who recite her story, the lady who has shown so much spirit and devotion was not one of those who blush to find good deeds fame. ‘Gar print me ballants that I am a worthy lady,’ #B# 30 makes her say; ‘Hae me to some writer’s house, that I may write down Gight’s lament and how I borrowed Geordie,’ #I a# 25; ‘Call for one of the best clerks, that he may write all this I’ve done for Geordie,’ #J# 36. What she really did say is perhaps faithfully given in #D# 18: ‘Where is there a writer’s house, that I may write to the north that I have won the life of Geordie?’ #I# and #J# are probably from stall-prints, and it has not been thought necessary to notice some things which may have been put into these to eke them out to a convenient length. #J# has an entirely spurious supplement. When the pair are riding away, and even as the wife is protesting her affection, Geordie turns round and says, A finger of Bignet’s lady’s hand is worth a’ your fair body. A dispute ensues, and Geordie pulls out a dagger and stabs his lady; he then takes to flight, and never is found. Another set, mentioned by Motherwell, makes Geordie drown his deliverer in the sea, in a fit of jealousy (Minstrelsy, p. lxxvi, 46). There is an English broadside ballad, on the death of “George Stoole” which seemed to Motherwell “evidently imitated from the Scottish song.” This was printed by H. Gosson, whose time is put at 1607–41.[91] This ballad was to be sung “to a delicate Scottish tune;” Georgy comes in as a rhyme at the end of stanzas not seldom; Georgy writes to his lady, bewailing his folly; he never stole no oxe nor cow, nor ever murdered any, but fifty horse he did receive of a merchant’s man of Gory, for which he was condemned to die, and did die. These are the data for determining the question of imitation. There is a later ‘Georgy’ ballad, of the same general cast, on the life and death of “George of Oxford,” a professed and confessed highwayman, a broadside printed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In this, Lady Gray hastens to Newcastle to beg Georgy’s life of the judge, and offers gold and land to save him, after the fashion of Lady Ward in ‘Hughie Graham;’ to no purpose, as in ‘Hughie Graham.’ This Georgy owns and boasts himself a thief, but with limitations much the same as those which are made a point of by the other; he never stole horse, mare, or cloven-foot, with one exception—the king’s white steeds, which he sold to Bohemia. Both of these ballads are given in an appendix.