“... She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, Woe to Barbara Allan!
‘O mother, mother, make my bed!
O make it saft and narrow!
Since my love died for me to-day,
I’ll die for him to-morrow.’”
Oh dear, how sad it was; and you never knew! Could it be, could it be, she cried one day to herself, that the dead, lovely Barbara Allan of the poem had got by some means muddled up in Time, and was in actual fact her Little Gal? Could it be that the maiden-name of the wife of Miss Allan’s father had been Rawlings?
Miss Rawlings was far too sensible merely to wonder about things. She at once enquired of Mr. Moffat (who had been once engaged to her dearest friend, Miss Simon, now no more) whether he knew anything about Barbara Allan’s family. “The family, Felicia?” Mr. Moffat had replied, his bristling eyebrows high in his head. And when, after a visit to the British Museum, Mr. Moffat returned with only two or three pages of foolscap closely written over with full particulars of the ballad and with “biographical details” of Bishop Percy and of Allan Ramsay and of Oliver Goldsmith and of the gentleman who had found the oldest manuscript copy of it in Glamis Castle, or some such ancient edifice, and of how enchantingly Samuel Pepys’s friend, Mrs. Knipp, used to sing him the air—but nothing else: Miss Rawlings very reluctantly gave up all certainty of this. “It still might be my Little Gal’s family,” she said, “and on the other hand it might not.” And she continued to say over to herself with infinite sorrow in her deep rich voice, that tragic stanza: