The bonny Brown Girl, etc., etc.
44. his Eilk.
296
WALTER LESLY
‘Walter Lesly,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 139.
A late, but life-like and spirited ballad.
Walter Lesly steals a girl, not for her beauty or blood, but for her mother’s dollars, of which he has need. She is tied on to a horse, taken to an ale-house, and put to bed. Lesly, weary with hard riding, falls asleep; the girl gets up and runs over moss, moor, hill and dale, barefoot. Lesly’s men pursue, but the road is full of pools and tires the men out. The girl effects her escape.
1
On the second of October, a Monday at noon,
In came Walter Lesly, to see his proper one;