#b# 6. I lay last night. _The rest wanting._ #b# 8. _Puts the question whether she will go back._ #b# 9. I lay last night. _The rest wanting._ #K. a.# _The order as delivered was 3, 1, 2,_ etc., _and the_ high-heeled shoes _were attributed to Lord Garrick._ Him, his, he _in 2 have been changed to_ her, her, she. _But a further change should be made for sense,_ in _1, 2: the lady should take off her high-heeled shoes and put on her low-heeled shoes; see #G# 4, I 8._ _Burden given also_: Lal dee dumpy dinky diddle dah day #b.# _Burden_: Rump a dump a dink a dink a day Rump a dump a dink a dink a dady. _Or_, Rink a dink a dink a dink a day Rink a dink a dink a dink a day dee. _Order as in_ #a#. 1^1. fetch me. 1^3. And take away. 2^1. fetched him down his. 2^3. And they took away his. 3^1. got home. 3^4. with the. 4^1. Go fetch me out. 4^3. And we’ll away to. 4^4. To _for_ And. 5^1. They fetched him out. 5^4. To overtake my. 6^3. lady bright. 7^3. you won’t. 201 BESSY BELL AND MARY GRAY #a.# Sharpe’s Ballad Book, 1823, p. 62. #b.# Lyle’s Ancient Ballads and Songs, 1827, p. 160, “collated from the singing of two aged persons, one of them a native of Perthshire.” #c.# Scott’s Minstrelsy, 1833, I, 45, two stanzas. A squib on the birth of the Chevalier St George, beginning Bessy Bell and Mary Grey, Those famous bonny lasses, shows that this little ballad, or song, was very well known in the last years of the seventeenth century.[51] The first stanza was made by Ramsay the beginning of a song of his own, and stands thus in Ramsay’s Poems, Edinburgh, 1721, p. 80:[52] O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, They are twa bonny lasses; They biggd a bower on yon Burn-brae, And theekd it oer wi rashes. Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, III, 60, gives, as recited to him by Sir Walter Scott, four stanzas which are simply #a# with ‘Lyndoch brae’ substituted in the third for Sharpe’s ‘Stronach haugh.’ ‘Dranoch haugh,’ nearly as in #b#, is, as will presently appear, the right reading. Sharpe’s third stanza, with the absurd variation of _royal_ kin, occurs in a letter of his of the date November 25, 1811 (Letters, ed. Allardyce, I, 504), and is printed in the Musical Museum, IV, *203, ed. 1853. In the course of a series of letters concerning the ballad in The Scotsman (newspaper), August 30 to September 8, 1886, several verses are cited with trivial variations from the texts here given. ‘Bessy Bell’ was made into this nursery-song in England (Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England, 1874, p. 246, No 484):