Page:The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, Volume 8, 1922.djvu/104

PREFATORY NOTE The Spae Wife may have been due to unconscious memory. In the Scotland of my husband's childhood, nurses sometimes crooned to their charges ancient airs whose origin is forgotten, and whose words were long ago lost. A Scotsman, Mr. George St. J. Bremner, of San Francisco, has kindly written out one that perfectly corresponds with the peculiar movement of the poem. He says: "This melody, I firmly believe, must have been running through Mr. Stevenson's head when he wrote the Spae Wife. If ever words and music were especially adapted to each other, certainly this melody and the song fit each other like hand and glove. The upward cadence of the first three lines, suiting so exactly with the interrogative character of the words, and the coarse downward cadence of the last, suiting so exactly with the noncommittal answer of the 'Spae Wife' leave no room for doubt that a reminiscence of one of 'Cummy's' lilts was haunting him at the time."

90