rds he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord
Barnard's lady--to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir nae bauld
baron's leave.'

'The lady stamped wi' her foot
And winked wi' her e'e;
But for a' that she could say or do
Forbidden he wadna be.'

It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays
the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the bloody
head to the mother.

Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are
_Lord Randal_ and _Edward_. These versions of a story of treachery and
blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received
many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of
tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with
which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or
mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns
recovered for Johnson's _Museum_, Lord Randal is poisoned--'eels boiled
in broo'--is identical with that given to his prototype in the
folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this
ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of
antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very
convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the
Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of
_Son Davie_, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of
_Edward_, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's _Reliques_. Here it is the
murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning
mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a
legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:

'"And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife?
Edward, Edward!
And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife
When ye gang over the sea, O?"

"The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
Mither, Mither!
The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
For them never mair will I see, O!"

"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear?
Edward, Edward!
And what will ye leave to your ain mother dear,
My dear son, now tell me, O?"

"The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
Mither, Mither!
The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
Sic counsels y