[I]. 'The Minister's Daughter of New York.' a. Buchan's MSS, II, 111. b. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 217. c. 'Hey wi the rose and the lindie O,' Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 106.
[J]. a. 'The Rose o Malindie O,' Harris MS., f. 10. b. Fragment communicated by Dr T. Davidson.
[K]. Motherwell's MS., p. 186.
[L]. 'Fine Flowers in the Valley,' Smith's Scottish Minstrel, IV, 33.
[M]. From Miss M. Reburn, as learned in County Meath, Ireland, one stanza.
Two fragments of this ballad, A, B, were printed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century; C-L were committed to writing after 1800; and, of these, E, H, J, K are now printed for the first time.
A-H differ only slightly, but several of these versions are very imperfect. A young woman, who passes for a leal maiden, gives birth to two babes [A, B, one, H, three], puts them to death with a penknife, B-F, and buries them, or, H, ties them hand and feet and buries them alive. She afterwards sees two pretty boys, and exclaims that if they were hers she would treat them most tenderly. They make answer that when they were hers they were very differently treated, rehearse what she had done, and inform or threaten her that hell shall be her portion, C, D, E, F, H. In I the children are buried alive, as in H, in J a strangled, in J b and L killed with the penknife, but the story is the same down to the termination, where, instead of simple hell-fire, there are various seven-year penances, properly belonging to the ballad of '[The Maid and the Palmer],' which follows this.
All the English ballads are in two-line stanzas.[181]
Until 1870 no corresponding ballad had been found in Denmark, though none was more likely to occur in Danish. That year Kristensen, in the course of his very remarkable ballad-quest in Jutland, recovered two versions which approach surprisingly near to Scottish tradition, and especially to E: Jydske Folkeviser, I, 329, No 121 A, B, 'Barnemordersken.' Two other Danish versions have been obtained since then, but have not been published. A and B are much the same, and a close translation of A will not take much more space than would be required for a sufficient abstract.
Little Kirsten took with her the bower-women five,
And with them she went to the wood belive.