"My sisters twa that are dead and gane,65
For whom we made a heavy maene,
It's you that's twinn'd them o' their life,
And wi' your cruel bloody knife.
Then for their life ye sair shall dree:
Ye sall be hangit on a tree,70
Or thrown into the poison'd lake,
To feed the toads and rattle-snake."
JELLON GRAME.
From Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, iii. 162.
"This ballad is published from tradition, with some conjectural emendations. It is corrected by a copy in Mrs. Brown's MS., from which it differs in the concluding stanzas. Some verses are apparently modernized.
"Jellon seems to be the same name with Jyllian, or Julian. 'Jyl of Brentford's Testament' is mentioned in Warton's History of Poetry, vol. ii. p. 40. The name repeatedly occurs in old ballads, sometimes as that of a man, at other times as that of a woman. Of the former is an instance in the ballad of The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter. [See this collection, vol. iii. p. 253.]
'Some do call me Jack, sweetheart,
And some do call me Jille.'