Her angry father, when he saw this, That he would lose his ae daughter, He swore if he had not been gude at the sword He durst not come to make his doors clatter. * * * * * It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat; The mither beneath the mools heard that. sung in Wuthering Heights, ch. 9, has not unnaturally been taken for a relic of a traditional Scottish ballad of a dead mother returning to her abused children. It is, in fact, a stanza (not literally well remembered) from the Danish ballad ‘Moderen under Mulde,’ Grundtvig, II, 470, No 89, =B= 11, translated by Jamieson, and given in the notes to the fourth canto of Scott’s Lady of the Lake. * * * * * The following “fragment,” given in Motherwell’s MS., p. 184, “from Mr William Steele of Greenock, advocate,” I suppose to have been the effort of a self-satisfied amateur, and to have been written as a fragment. The third and fourth stanzas recall the broadside ballad ‘The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy.’ Lady Margaret has bound her silken snood A little aboon her bree, Lady Margaret has kilted her grey mantel A little aboon her knee. Lady Margaret has left her bonnie bower, But and her father’s ha, And with Lord Hugh Montgomerie Lady Margaret has gane awa. * * * * * * * ‘I have made a bed, Lady Margaret, Beneath the hawthorn-tree; It’s lang and it’s deep, and there thou shalt sleep Till I come back to thee.’ * * * * * * * Then out and spake her father dear, As he sat down to dine, ‘Gae, page, and tell Lady Margaret to come And fill for me the wine. ‘Gae, page, and tell Lady Margaret to come And glad her father’s ee; The wine that is poured by her fair, fair hand Is sweetest aye to me.’ Then out and spake the fat earth-worm, That wons beneath the stane; ‘Yestreen I fed on a rosie cheek And on a white hause-bane. ‘Yestreen I fed on a rosy cheek And on a snaw-white bree; But never again Lady Margaret Shall fill the wine for thee.”@ FOOTNOTES: [117] Stanza 1^{1,2} of Percy’s ballad is from The Taming of the Shrew, iv, 1; 3, 5, 7, are, wholly or in part, from Hamlet, iv, 5; 12, 13, from Fletcher’s Queen of Corinth, iii, 2; 15 from Hamlet, as before; 17, 18, from Much Ado about Nothing, ii, 3; one line of 22 from King Lear, iii, 4. [118] The verses from this tale are printed separately in Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 117, ‘The Maid and Fairy.’ [119] But Jamieson confesses: “Of the verses which have been introduced I cannot answer for the exactness of any, except the stanza put into the mouth of the king of Elfland, which was indelibly impressed upon my memory [though J. was only seven or eight years old] long before I knew anything of Shakspere.” The stanza is: [in came the king of Elfland,]