Toward the end of the last century we begin to hear that the people in Ayrshire make the wife of the Earl of Cassilis the heroine of the ballad. This name, under the instruction of Burns, was adopted into the copy in Johnson’s Museum (which, as to the rest, is Ramsay’s), and in the index to the second volume of the Museum, 1788, we read, “neighboring tradition strongly vouches for the truth of this story.” After this we get the tradition in full, of course with considerable variety in the details, and sometimes with criticism, sometimes without.[45] The main points in the traditional story are that John, sixth earl of Cassilis, married, for his first wife, Lady Jean Hamilton, whose affections were preëngaged to one Sir John Faa, of Dunbar. Several years after, when Lady Cassilis had become the mother of two children,[46] Sir John Faa took the opportunity of the earl’s absence from home (while Lord Cassilis was attending the Westminster Assembly, say some) to present himself at the castle, accompanied by a band of gypsies and himself disguised as a gypsy, and induced his old love to elope with him. But the earl returned in the nick of time, went in pursuit, captured the whole party, or all but one,[47] who is supposed to tell the story, and hanged them, on the dule tree, “a most umbrageous plane, which yet flourishes upon a mound in front of the castle gate.” The fugitive wife was banished from board and bed, and confined for life in a tower at Maybole, built for the purpose. “Eight heads carved in stone below one of the turrets are said to be the effigies of so many of the gypsies.”[48] The ford by which the lady and her lover crossed the River Doon is still called The Gypsies’ Steps. Several accounts put the abduction at the time when the Earl of Cassilis was attending the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. This was in September, 1643. It is now known that Lady Cassilis died in December, 1642. What is much more important, it is known from two letters written by the earl immediately after her death that nothing could have occurred of a nature to alienate his affection, for in the one he speaks of her as a “dear friend” and “beloved yoke-fellow,” and in the other as his “dear bed-fellow.”[49] “Seldom, when stripped of extraneous matter, has tradition been better supported than it has been in the case of Johnie Faa and the Countess of Cassilis:” Maidment, Scotish Ballads, 1868, II, 184. In a sense not intended, this is quite true; most of the traditions which have grown out of ballads have as slight a foundation as this. The connection of the ballad with the Cassilis family (as Mr Macmath has suggested to me) may possibly have arisen from the first line of some copy reading, ‘The gypsies came to the castle-gate.’ As #F# 1^3 has perverted Earl of Cassilis to Earl of Castle, so Castle may have been corrupted into Cassilis.[50] Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 28, translates freely eight stanzas from Aytoun.