Her hair is five quarters long; she twists it round his hand and draws him home, #C#; ties it round his middle and carries him home, #D#. She takes three lachters of her hair, ties them tight round his middle and carries him home, #B#. _His_ hair is five quarters long! she ties it to her horse’s mane and trails him home, #K#.[105] The carrying strikes one as unpractical, the trailing as barbarous. In #L#, after the lover is slain, the surviving lords and her brother trail him by the heels to Yarrow water and throw him into a whirlpool. The lady, searching for him, sees him ‘deeply drowned.’ His hair, which we must suppose to float, is five quarters long; she twines it round her hand and draws him out. Raising no petty questions, it appears enough to say that this is the only version of fourteen in which the drowning occurs, and that the drowning of the lover is the characteristic of No 215, the next following ballad, which has otherwise been partly confused with this.[106] The lady’s father urges her to restrain her grief; he will wed her with as good a lord as she has lost, or a better; she rejects his suggestions. Her heart breaks, #B#, #I#; she dies in her father’s arms, #D#, #F-H#, #J-L#, being at the time big with child, #B#, #D#, #F-H#, #J#. The lady tells her father to wed his sons, #B# 12; his seven sons, #J# 18. So ‘Clerk Saunders’ (of which this may be a reminiscence, for we do not hear of seven sons in this ballad), No 69, #G# 28; cf. #A# 26, #E# 19. She bids him take home his ousen and his kye, #E# 15, #F# 12, #G# 8, #H# 9. This I conceive to be an interpolation by a reciter who followed the tradition cited from Hogg further on. The message to the mother to come take up her son in #I# 8 may possibly be a reminiscence from ‘Johnie Cock,’ No 114. It occurs in no other copy, and comes in awkwardly. ‘The Braes of Yarrow’ (‘Busk ye, busk ye, my bony, bony bride’), written by William Hamilton of Bangour “in imitation of the ancient Scottish manner,’ was suggested by this ballad.[107] ‘The Dowy Dens,’ Evans’s Old Ballads, 1810, III, 342, has the same foundation. ‘The Haughs o Yarrow,’ a modern piece in Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 211, repeats with a slight change the third stanza of #O#, and has further on half a stanza from ‘Willie’s rare,’ No 215. James Hogg, in sending #E# a to Sir Walter Scott, wrote as follows: “Tradition placeth the event on which this song is founded very early. That the song hath been written near the time of the transaction appears quite evident, although, like others, by frequent singing the language is become adapted to an age not so far distant. The bard does not at all relate particulars, but only mentions some striking features of a tragical event which everybody knew. This is observable in many of the productions of early times; at least the secondary bards seem to have regarded their songs as purely temporary.