e with him, but he answers her that he is
her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her
haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':

'The wee worms are my bedfellows
And cauld clay is my sheets';

and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the
Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the
betrayed and slain knight in _Child Rowland_, the first line of which,
preserved in _King Lear_ as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to
strike a keynote of ballad romance:

'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'

mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they
tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us,
sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening:

'And he tirled at the pin;
And wha sae ready as his fause love,
To rise and let him in.'

The passages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the
lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not
surpassed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything
in ballad or other literature:

'She hadna ridden a mile, a mile,
Never a mile but ane,
When she was 'ware o' a tall young man
Riding slowly o'er the plain.
She turned her to the right about,
And to the left turned she;
But aye 'tween her and the wan moonlight
That tall knight did she see.'

She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she
appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal
true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:

'But nothing did that tall knight say,
And nothing did he blin;
Still slowly rade he on before,
And fast she rade behind,'

until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:

'"This water it is deep," he said,
"As it is wondrous dun;
But it is sic as a saikless maid,
And a leal true knight can swim."'

They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:

'"The water is waxing deeper still,
Sae does it wax mair wide;
And aye the farther we ride on,
Farther off is the other side."

. . . . .

The knight turned slowly round about
All in the middle stream,
He stretched out his hand to that lady,
And loudly she did scream.

"O, this is Hallow-morn," he said,