'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 home with him, but he answers her that he is her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':
'The wee worms are my bedfellows
And cauld clay is my sheets';
and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the betrayed and slain knight in Child Rowland, the first line of which, preserved in King Lear as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to strike a keynote of ballad romance:
'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'
mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us, sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening: