'Ye'll drown my sister as she's dune me.'
P, which is disordered at the end, seems to have agreed with O. In Q the ghost sends, by the medium of the miller and his daughter, respects to father, mother, and true-love, adding a lock of yellow hair for the last. The ghost is found in N, Pinkerton's copy, as well, but there appears to the lover at dead of night, two days after the drowning. It informs him of the murder, and he makes search for the body. This is a wide departure from the original story, and plainly a modern perversion. Another variation, entirely wanting in ancient authority, appears in R, S. The girl is not dead when she has floated down to the mill-dam, and, being drawn out of the water by the miller, offers him a handsome reward to take her back to her father [S, to throw her in again!]. The miller takes the reward, and pushes the girl in again, for which he is hanged.[140]
Q has a burden partly Gaelic,
... ohone and aree (alack and O Lord),
On the banks of the Banna (White River), ohone and aree,
which may raise a question whether the Scotch burden Binnorie (pronounced Bínnorie, as well as Binnórie) is corrupted from it, or the corruption is on the other side. Mr Campbell notices as quaint the reply in stanza 9:
'I did not put you in with the design
Just for to pull you out again.'
We have had a similar reply, made under like circumstances, in Polish versions of No 4: see [p. 40], [note].
All the Norse versions of this ballad are in two-line stanzas, and all the English, except L b and in part L a.
Some of the traits of the English and Norse story are presented by an Esthonian ballad, 'The Harp,' Neus, Ehstnische Volkslieder, No 13, p. 56. Another version is given in Rosenplänter's Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniss der ehstnischen Sprache, Heft 4, 142, and a third, says Neus, in Ch. H. J. Schlegel's Reisen in mehrere russische Gouvernements, V, 140. A young woman, who tells her own story, is murdered by her sisters-in-law and buried in a moor. She comes up as a birch, from which, with the jaw-bone of a salmon, the teeth of a pike, and her own hair (the account is somewhat confused) a harp is made. The harp is taken to the hall by the murdered girl's brother, and responds to his playing with tones of sorrow like those of the bride who leaves father and mother for the house of a husband.[141]
A Slovak ballad often translated (Talvj, Historical View, etc., p. 392; Wenzig's Slawische Volkslieder, p. 110, Westslawischer Märchenschatz, 273, and Bibliothek Slavischer Poesien, p. 134; Lewestam, Polnische Volksagen und Märchen, p. 151) comes nearer in some respects. A daughter is cursed by her mother for not succeeding in drawing water in frosty weather. Her bucket turns to stone, but she to a maple. Two fiddlers come by, and, seeing a remarkably fine tree, propose to make of it fiddles and fiddle-sticks. When they cut into the tree, blood spirts out. The tree bids them go on, and when they have done, play before the mother's door, and sing, Here is your daughter, that you cursed to stone. At the first notes the mother runs to the window, and begs them to desist, for she has suffered much since she lost her daughter.