It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat;
The mither beneath the mools heard that.
sung in Wuthering Heights, ch. 9, has not unnaturally been taken for a relic of a traditional Scottish ballad of a dead mother returning to her abused children. It is, in fact, a stanza (not literally well remembered) from the Danish ballad ‘Moderen under Mulde,’ Grundtvig, II, 470, No 89, B 11, translated by Jamieson, and given in the notes to the fourth canto of Scott’s Lady of the Lake.
The following “fragment,” given in Motherwell’s MS., p. 184, “from Mr William Steele of Greenock, advocate,” I suppose to have been the effort of a self-satisfied amateur, and to have been written as a fragment. The third and fourth stanzas recall the broadside ballad ‘The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy.’
Lady Margaret has bound her silken snood
A little aboon her bree,
Lady Margaret has kilted her grey mantel
A little aboon her knee.