ad, he makes a plectrum from
'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel
plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:

'Wae to my sister, fair Helen!'

In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead
from their graves. In the tale of _The Cruel Mother_, we seem to see the
workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the
victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie
greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:

'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head,
All alone, and alonie O!
She 's gone to do a fearful deed
Down by the greenwood bonnie O!'

The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:

'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa',
All alone and alonie O!
She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba'
Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!

The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all
manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the
ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:

'O cruel mither, when we were thine,
All alone and alonie O!
From us ye did our young lives twine,
Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'

Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief,
which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as
late as the middle of the seventeenth century--that of the Ordeal by
Touch. In _Young Benjie_ another test is applied to find the murderer;
and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the
wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit
corpse':

'About the middle of the night
The cocks began to craw;
And at the dead hour o' the night,
The corpse began to thraw.'

It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose
head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for
the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':

'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers,
Ye maunna Benjie hang,
But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey een
Before ye let him gang.'

In _Proud Lady Margaret_, again, we have a form of the legend, told in
many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German
ballad of _The Lady of the Kynast_, of a haughty and cruel dame whose
riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger
knight. She would fain ride hom