William was buried in St. Mary's Kirk,
Lady Margaret in St. Mary's Quire;
And out of her grave there grew a birk,
And out of the knight's a brier.

And they twa met and they twa plait,
As fain they wad be near;
And a' the world might ken right well
They were twa lovers dear.'

Birk and brier; vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive--the
plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and
intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the
'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad--'Wow but he was rough!'--plucks up
the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the
Portuguese folk-song, cuts down the cypress and orange that perpetuate
the loves of Count Nello and the Infanta, and then grinds his teeth to
see the double stream of blood flow from them and unite, proving that
'in death they are not divided.'

The scene of the Scottish story is supposed to be Blackhouse, on the
Douglas Burn, a feeder of the Yarrow, the farm on which Scott's friend,
William Laidlaw, the author of _Lucy's Flittin'_, was born. Seven stones
on the heights above, where the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' with his dog Hector,
herded sheep and watched for the rising of the Queen of Faery through
the mist, mark the spot where the seven bauld brethren fell.

But Yarrow Vale is strewn with the sites of those tragedies of the
far-off years, forgotten by history but remembered in song and
tradition. Its green hills enclose the very sanctuary of romantic
ballad-lore. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the 'good
heart's bluid' that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught
in the 'cleaving o' the craig.' The winds that sweep the hillsides and
bend 'the birks a' bowing' seem to whisper still of the wail of the
'winsome marrow,' and to have an undernote of sadness on the brightest
day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very
spirit of 'pastoral melancholy' broods and sleeps in this enchanted
valley. St. Mary's Kirk and Loch; Henderland Tower and the Dow Linn;
Blackhouse and Douglas Craig; Yarrow Kirk and Deucharswire; Hangingshaw
and Tinnis; Broadmeadows and Newark; Bowhill and Philiphaugh--what
memories of love and death, of faith and wrong, of blood and of tears
they carry! Always by Yarrow the comely youth goes forth, only to fall
by the sword, fighting against odds in the 'Dowie Dens,' or to be caught
and drowned in the treachero