15.3 ‘hause-bane,’ neck.
Her hair it was three quarters lang,
It hang baith side and yellow;
She tied it round her white hause-bane,
And tint her life on Yarrow.
THE TWA BROTHERS
The Text is from Sharpe’s Ballad Book (1823). Scott included no version of this ballad in his Minstrelsy; but Motherwell and Jamieson both had traditional versions. Motherwell considered it essential that the deadly wound should be accidental; but it is far more typical of a ballad-hero that he should lose his temper and kill his brother; and, as Child points out, it adds to the pathetic generosity of the slain brother in providing excuses for his absence to be made to his father, mother, and sister.
The Story.—Motherwell and Sharpe were more or less convinced that the ballad was founded on an accident that happened in 1589 to a Somerville, who was killed by his brother’s pistol going off.
This ballad is still in circulation in the form of a game amongst American children—the last state of more than one old ballad otherwise extinct.