'My Geordie, O my Geordie,
The love I bear my Geordie!
For the very ground I walk upon
Bears witness I lo'e Geordie.'

And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of
ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although
it may be of harsher and coarser flavour. Space does not allow of doing
justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made
familiar by sweet airs, like _Hunting Tower_, or _Bessie Bell and Mary
Gray_, or the _Banks of the Lomond_; others, and these chiefly from the
wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of
heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted,
light-stepping tunes as ever were sung--_Glenlogie_, for instance:

'There were four-and-twenty nobles
Rode through Banchory fair;
And bonnie Glenlogie
Was flower o' them there.'

For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the
rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather
about the family history and the family trees of the great houses--the
Gordons for choice--planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs
at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of
love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or
Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of
Fyvie.

CHAPTER VI

THE HISTORICAL BALLAD

'It fell about the Lammas tide,
When the muirmen win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
Into England, to drive a prey.'

_The Battle of Otterburn._

The kindly Scot will not quarrel with the comparative mythologist who
tells him that the superstitions embalmed in his ballad minstrelsy are
wanderers out of misty times and far countries--primitive ideas and
beliefs that may have started with his remote ancestors from the heart
of the East, to find harbour in the valleys of the Cheviots and the
islands of the West, or that have drifted thither with the tide of later
inroads. Nor will he greatly protest when the literary historian assures
him that the plots and incidents in the popular old rhymes of the
frenzies and parlous adventures of love have been borrowed or adapted
from the metrical and prose romances of the Middle Ages. He can
appreciate in his poetry, as in his pedigree, high and long descent; all
the more since, as he flatters