'When your ring turns pale and wan,
Then I 'm in love wi' another man.'
Or, as in Rose the Red and Lily Flower, it is a magic horn, to be blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance. These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in The Drowned Lovers, in Child Rowland, in Annie of Lochryan, and in a host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not differ greatly in Willie's Lady—the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'—from those mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy Blin''—the Brownie—that give the cue by which the evil charm is unwound. The Brownie—the Lubber Fiend—owns a department of legend and ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by lot:
'We were sisters, sisters seven,
Bowing down, bowing down;
The fairest maidens under heaven;
And aye the birks a' bowing.
And we keest kevils us amang,
Bowing down, bowing down;
To see who would to greenwood gang,
And aye the birks a' bowing.'
The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk Saunders; in other ballads it is done by passes of the hand, or of a crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats made o' the birk':
'It neither grew in syke or ditch,
Nor yet in ony sheugh;
But at the gate of Paradise
That birk grew green eneuch.'
Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.' When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing in her brain:
'What hae ye made o' the fause Sir John
That ye gaed wi' yestreen?'
And in Earl Richard and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among the green summer leaves:
'"Tell me, my bonnie bird,
When shall I marry me?"
"When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry thee"';