‘Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she’ll hae but three;
There was Mary Seton, an Mary Beaton,
An Mary Carmichael, an me.’
33, 43. We should read Sink ye, soom ye, as in A 33, U 143, X 43, and other copies.
T
Communicated to Sir Walter Scott by Mrs Christiana Greenwood, London, 21st February and 27th May, 1806, from the recitation of her mother and her aunt, who learned the ballad above fifty years before from Kirstan Scot, then an old woman, at Longnewton, near Jedburgh: Letters at Abbotsford, I, Nos 173, 189.
1
There was a duke, and he dwelt in York,