e to her lost lover as he dances with her
bridesmaiden:

'"I 've seen other days wi' you, Willie,
And so hae mony mae;
Ye would hae danced wi' me yoursel'
And let a' ithers gae"';

and, dancing, she drops dead.

Fasting, and fire, and sickness unto death were, however, tame ordeals
compared with those which 'Burd Helen' came through, as they are
described in the ballad Professor Child holds, not without reason, to
have 'perhaps no superior' in our own or any other tongue. Patient
Grizel, herself the incarnation in literary form of a type of woman's
faithfulness and meek endurance of wrong that had floated long in
mediaeval tradition, might have shrunk from some of the cruel tasks which
Lord Thomas--the 'Child Waters' of the favourite English variant--lays
upon the mother of his unborn child--the woman whose self-surrender had
been so complete that she has not the blessing of Holy Church and the
support of wifely vows to comfort her in her hour of trial. All the
summer day she runs by his bridle-rein until they come to the Water of
Clyde, which 'Sweet Willie and May Margaret' also sought to ford on a
similar errand:

'And he was never so courteous a knight,
As stand and bid her ride;
And she was never so poor a may,
As ask him for to bide.'

She stables his steed; she waits humbly at table as the little page-boy;
she listens, her colour coming and going, to the mother's scorns and the
young sister's naive questions. But never, until the supreme moment of
her distress, does she draw one sign of pity or relenting from her harsh
lord. Then, indeed, love and remorse, as if they had been dammed back,
break forth like a flood, that bursts the very door, and makes it 'in
flinders flee.' And because

'The marriage and the kirkin'
Were baith held on ae day,'

our simple balladist bids us believe that the twain lived happily ever
after.

The variations of this ancient tale, localised in nearly every European
country, are innumerable; and Professor Veitch was disposed to trace
them to the thirteenth century _Tale of the Ash_, by Marie of France.
The 'Fair Annie' of another ballad on the theme seems to have borrowed
both name and history directly from the 'Skiaen Annie' of Danish
folk-poetry. Here the old love suffers the like indignity that was
thrown upon the too-too submissive Griselda; she has to make ready the
bridal bed for her supplanter and do other menial offic