The other versions give the story a tragical catastrophe. In #B#, Barbara is forced into Glenlion’s bed. Afterwards she exclaims that if she had paper and pen she would write to her lover in Dundee. No difficulty seems to be made; she writes her letter, and sends it by the ever-ready boy. Geordie, lying in a window, sees the boy, asks for news, and is told that his love is stolen by Glenlion. He orders his horse, in fact three horses, and also a mourning hat and cloak; but though he tires out all three horses, his love is dead before he reaches Glenlion. This copy is pieced out with all sorts of commonplaces from other ballads: see 9 (which is nonsense), 10, 13, 14, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30. #C# is a briefer, that is, an unfarced, form of #B#. Glenlion is corrupted to Linlyon. #D# has its commonplaces again. For Barbara we have Annie, and Glendinning for Glenlion, and a brother Jemmy instead of a lover. In #E# the ravisher is Lochell. Dr Joseph Robertson in his Adversaria, MS., p. 87, gives these two lines of ‘Baby Livingston:’ O bony Baby Livingston Was playin at the ba.[122] The kidnapping of women for a compulsory marriage was a practice which prevailed for hundreds of years, and down to a late date, and, of course, not only in Great Britain. The unprotected female, especially if she had any property, must have been in a state of miserable insecurity, and even a convent was far from furnishing her an asylum. See for England, in the first half of the fifteenth century, Beamont’s Annals of the Lords of Warrington, pp. 256–61 and 265 f.; for Scotland, in the same century and the two following, Sharpe’s Ballad Book, p. 99 ff., R. Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland, 1858, I, 223–5, 415 f.; for Ireland, Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 1872, I, 417 ff. Other Scottish ballads celebrating similar abductions are ‘Eppie Morrie,’ ‘The Lady of Arngosk,’ and ‘Rob Roy,’ which immediately follow.[123] #A b# is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 126, No 18. * * * * * A #a.# Jamieson-Brown MS., Appendix, p. xii, sent by Mrs Brown to Jamieson, in a letter dated September 15, 1800. #b.# Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, II, 135, as taken from Mrs Brown’s recitation a short time before a was written down. 1 O bonny Baby Livingston Went forth to view the hay, And by it came him Glenlion, Sta bonny Baby away. 2 O first he’s taen her silken coat, And neest her satten gown, Syne rowd her in a tartan plaid, And hapd her round and rown. 3 He has set her upon his steed And roundly rode away, And neer loot her look back again The live-long summer’s day. 4 He’s carried her oer hills and muirs Till they came to a Highland glen, And there he’s met his brother John, With twenty armed men.