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And there's Dunbog has warned the Red Rotten and John Young aff his grunds black be his cast! he's nae gentleman, nor drap's bluid o' gentleman, wad grudge twa gangrel puir bodies the shelter o' a waste house, and the thristles by the roadside for a bit cuddy, and the bits o' rotten birk to boil their drap parritch wi'. Weel, there's Ane abune a'; but we'll see if the red cock craw not in his bonnie barn-yard ae morning before day-dawing.
Henry blushed like a girl, and said that he trusted never to be so lacking in courtesy as the knight; and the King of Wight, wishing to change the subject, mentioned that the Lady Eleanor had sung or said certain choice ballads, and Henry eagerly entreated for one. It was the pathetic 'Wife of Usher's Well' that Eleanor chose, with the three sons whose hats were wreathen with the birk that
I have been up the glen this afternoon, past Mar Lodge, to the Linn of Dee a fine cascade through rocks; the water is so clear that you can see the rocks under it, and wild blasted pines growing all round. I was sorry to leave Birk Hall.
When near her, you were sensible of a strange, subtle, intoxicating perfume, very fragrant, perfectly indefinable, which clung, not only to her dress, but to every thing belonging to her. From what flowers it was distilled no artist in essences alive could have told. I incline to think that, like the "birk" in the ghost's garland, "They were not grown on earthly bank, Nor yet on earthly sheugh."
In Scotch ballads the birch is associated with the dead, an illustration of which we find in the subjoined lines: "I dreamed a dreary dream last nicht; God keep us a' frae sorrow! I dreamed I pu'd the birk sae green, Wi' my true love on Yarrow. I'll redde your dream, my sister dear, I'll tell you a' your sorrow; You pu'd the birk wi' your true love; He's killed, he's killed on Yarrow."
"Humbert Birk, a burgess of note in the town of Oppenheim, had a country-house, called Berenbach. He died in the month of November, 1620, a few days before the feast of St. Martin. On the Saturday which followed his funeral they began to hear certain noises in the house where he had lived with his first wife; for at the time of his death he had married again.
But imagination cannot bear mortal man thus far. "Upon the banks of Paradise" those "twa clerks" may have seen the like; yet, had they done so their hats would have been adorned not with "the birk," but with plumes of Odontoglossum citrosmum. I have but another word to say.
That it is an archaic story of the kind in the Thomas of Ercildoune and so many more fairy-tales, e.g., Kate Crack-a-Nuts, is certain. The "River of Blades" and "The Fighting Warriors" are known from the Eddic Poems. The angelica is like the green birk of that superb fragment, the ballad of the Wife of Usher's Well a little more frankly heathen, of course
"It fell about the Martinmas, When nights were lang and mirk, That wife's twa sons cam hame again, And their hats were o' the birk. "It did na graw by bush or brae, Nor yet in ony shough; But by the gates o' paradise That birk grew fair eneugh." The Wife of Usher's Well. It is the evening of the 15th of February, 1587, and Mrs.
Or again, if you ever go up Deeside in Scotland, towards Balmoral, and turn up Glen Muick, towards Alt-na-guisach, of which you may see a picture in the Queen's last book, you will observe standing on your right hand, just above Birk Hall, three pretty rounded knolls, which they call the Coile Hills. You may easily know them by their being covered with beautiful green grass instead of heather.
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