There is a considerable number of other ballads which are scarcely less liable to suspicion as modern compositions, and which are all marked more or less by the peculiarities seen in the above group. Several of them are based, like the one just noticed, on irregular love, which they commonly treat with little reproach, and usually with a romantic tenderness. _Willie and May Margaret_[22] describes a young lover crossing the Clyde in a flood to see his mistress, and as denied access by her mother in a feigned voice, after which he is drowned in recrossing the river; the ballad being thus a kind of counterpart of the _Lass of Lochryan_. In _Young Huntin_, otherwise called _Earl Richard_, the hero is killed in his mistress's bower through jealousy, and we have then a verse of wonderful power--such as no rustic and unlettered bard ever wrote, or ever will write: [22] Called, in Professor Aytoun's collection, _The Mother's Malison_; and in Mr Buchan's, _The Drowned Lovers_. 'O slowly, slowly wanes the night, And slowly daws the day: There is a dead man in my bower, I wish he were away.' One called _Fair Annie_ relates how a mistress won upon her lover, and finally gained him as a husband, by patience, under the trial of seeing a new bride brought home.[23] In the latter, the behaviour of the patient mistress is thus described: [23] A ballad named _Burd Ellen_, resembling _Fair Annie_ in the general cast of the story, is a Scottish modification of the ballad of _Child Waters_, published by Percy, from his folio manuscript, 'with some corrections.' It probably came through the same mill as _Gil Morrice_, though with less change--a conjecture rendered the more probable, for reasons to be seen afterwards, from its having been obtained by Mr Jamieson from Mrs Brown of Falkland. O she has served the lang tables Wi' the white bread and the wine; And aye she drank the wan water, To keep her colour fine. The expression, the wan water, occurs in several of this group of ballads. Thus, in _Johnie of Bradislee_: Is there ever a bird in this hale forest Will do as mickle for me, As dip its wing in the wan water, And straik it o'er my ee-bree? And in the _Douglas Tragedy_: O they rade on, and on they rade, And a' by the light o' the moon, Until they cam to yon wan water, And there they lighted down. See further in _Young Huntin_: And they hae ridden along, along, All the long summer's tide, Until they came to the wan water, The deepest place in Clyde. The circumstance is very suspicious, for we find this phrase in no other ballads. In _Clerk Saunders_, the hero is slain in his mistress's bower, by the rage of one of her seven brothers, whose act is described in precisely the same terms as the slaughter of _Gil Morrice_ by the bold baron: