"What would ye give to your own true lover?"
With a heigh-ho! and a lily gay.
"My dying kiss, and my love for ever!"
As the primrose spreads so sweetly.
The Portuguese ballad of "Helena," which has not much in common with "Lord Roland"—except that it is a story of treachery—is brought into relation with it by its bequests. Helena is a blameless wife whom a cruel mother-in-law first encourages to pay a visit to her parents, and then represents to her husband as having run away from him in his absence. No sooner has he returned from his journey than he rides irate after his wife. When he arrives he is met by the news that a son is born to him, but unappeased he orders the young mother to rise from her bed and follow him. She obeys, saying that in a well-ordered marriage it is the husband who commands; only, before she goes, she kisses her son and bids her mother tell him of these kisses when he grows up. Then her husband takes her to a high mountain, where the agony of death comes upon her. The husband asks: "To whom leavest thou thy jewels?" She answers: "To my sister; if thou wilt permit it." "To whom leavest thou thy cross and the stones of thy necklace?" "The cross I leave to my mother; surely she will pray for me; she will not care to have the stones, thou canst keep them—if to another thou givest them, better than I, let her adorn herself with them." "Thy substance, to whom leavest thou?" "To thee, my husband; God grant it may profit thee." "To whom leavest thou thy son, that he may be well brought up?" "To thy mother, and may it please God that he should make himself loved of her." "Not to that dog," cries the husband, his eyes at last opened, "she might well kill him. Leave him rather to thy mother, who will bring him up well; she will know how to wash him with her tears, and she will take the coif from her head to swaddle him."
A strange, wild Roumanian song, translated by Mr C. F. Keary (Nineteenth Century, No. lxviii.), closes with a list of "gifts" of the same character:
"But mother, oh mother, say how
Shall I speak, and what name call him now?"
"My beloved, my step-son,
My heart's love, my cherished one."