He tied a ribbon on every branch,
Put up a flag his men might see;
But little did his false faes ken
He meant them any injurie.

He set his horn unto his mouth,

And he has blawn baith loud and shrill: And then three thousand armed men Cam tripping all out ower the hill.

"Deliver us our chief," they all did cry; "It's by our hand that ye must die." "Here is your chief," the Turk replied, With that fell on his bended knee.

"O mercy, mercy, good fellows all, Mercy, I pray you'll grant to me;" "Such mercy as ye meant to give, Such mercy we shall give to thee.”

This Turk they in his castel burnt,
That stood upon yon hill so hie;
John Thomson's gay ladie they took

And hanged her on the greenwood tree!

THE CRUEL MOTHER

A small fragment of this ballad appeared in the introductory note to the ballad of Lady Anne, printed in "The Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii. Through the kindness of a friend we are now enabled to give the ballad in a complete state. Like many other ancient pieces of a similar description, it has a burden of no meaning and much childishness, the repetition of which, at the end of the first and third lines of every stanza, has been omitted. The reader, however, has a right to have the ballad as we received it, and therefore he may, in the first of the places pointed out, insert

"Three, three, and three by three;"

and in the second

"Three, three, and thirty-three;"

which will give him it entire and unmutilated.—MOTHER

WELL.

SHE leaned her back unto a thorn,

And there she has her two babes born.

She took frae 'bout her ribbon-belt,

And there she bound them hand and foot.

She has ta'en out her wee penknife,

And there she ended baith their life.

She has howked a hole baith deep and wide, She has put them in baith side by side.

She has covered them o'er wi' a marble stane,
Thinking she would gang maiden hame.

As she was walking by her father's castle wa',
She saw twa pretty babes playing at the ba’.
"O bonnie babes, gin ye were mine,
I would dress you up in satin fine!

"O, I would dress you in the silk,
And wash you aye in morning milk!"

"O cruel mother, we were thine,
And thou made us to wear the twine.

"O cursed mother! heaven's high,
And that's where thou will ne'er win nigh.

"O cursed mother! hell is deep,
And there thou'll enter step by step."

THE FIRE OF FRENDRAUGHT.

For the recovery of this interesting ballad, hitherto supposed to have been lost, the public is indebted to the industrious research of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq., of Edinburgh. It has already appeared in a small volume of exceeding rarity, privately printed at Edinburgh, in the beginning of 1824, under the title of A North Countrie Garland; but with the disadvantage of containing a very considerable number of slight verbal and literal inaccuracies, which in the present copy are carefully corrected by collation with Mr Sharpe's MS. The ballad itself has a high degree of poetic merit, and probably was written at the time by an eye-witness of the event which it records; for there is a horrid vivacity of colouring and circumstantial minuteness in the description of the agonies of the unhappy sufferers which none but a spectator could have given.

The guilt or innocence of Frendraught and his Lady has been, and, perhaps, will always be, problematical; it were but a fruitless waste of words now to seek to prove the one or to establish the other.

Spalding, whom Gordon, in his "History of the Illustrious Family of Gordon," says, "lived not far from the place, and had his account from eye-witnesses," minutely details the circumstances on which the ballad is founded.

THE eighteenth of October,

A dismal tale to hear,

How good Lord John and Rothiemay
Were both burnt in the fire.

When steeds was saddled and well bridled, And ready for to ride,

Then out came her and false Frendraught, Inviting them to bide.

Said "Stay this night until we sup,
The morn until we dine;

"Twill be a token of good 'greement
'Twixt your good Lord and mine."

“We'll turn again," said good Lord John"But no," said Rothiemay

"My steed's trapann'd, my bridle's broke, I fear the day I'm fey.'

رو

When mass was sung, and bells was rung,
And all men bound for bed,
Then good Lord John and Rothiemay
In one chamber were laid.

They had not long cast off their cloaths,
And were but now asleep-
When the weary smoke began to rise,
Likewise the scorching heat.

"O waken, waken, Rothiemay,
O waken, brother dear,
And turn you to our Saviour—
There is strong treason here."

When they were dressed in their cloaths,
And ready for to boun;

The doors and windows was all secured
The roof-tree burning down.

He did him to the wire-window
As fast as he could gang-

Says "Wae to the hands put in the stancheons,
For out we'll never win."

When he stood at the wire-window,
Most doleful to be seen,
He did espy her, Lady Frendraught,
Who stood upon the green.

Cried-"Mercy, mercy, Lady Frendraught,
Will ye not sink with sin?
For first your husband killed my father,
And now you burn his son."

O then out spoke her, Lady Frendraught,
And loudly did she cry-

"It were great pity for good Lord John,
But none for Rothiemay.

But the keys are casten in the deep draw-well,
Ye cannot get away."*

* Mr Finlay, after regretting that all his attempts to recover this ballad have proved unsuccessful, gives, in the words of a correspondent, the following particulars regarding it, which we subjoin as illustrative of the lines above cited:-"A lady, a near relation of mine, lived near the spot in her youth for some time, and remembers having heard the old song mentioned by Ritson, but cannot repeat it. She says there was a verse which stated, that the lord and lady locked the door of the tower, and flung the keys into the draw-well, and that, many years ago, when the well was cleared out, this tradition was