Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/232

228 to one of the most giddy gaiety, "what sit ye lilting there for, on the broad green bough—wasting yere sweetest songs on a fool quean like me: but ye shall not go unrewarded." So saying, she scattered a spoonful of curds beside her on the grass, and said, with some abatement of her mirth: "Come, and peckle at my hand, my poor feathered innocents—ilka bird of the forest, save the raven and the hooded crow, is a sister to me." A redbreast as she spoke, with an audacity which that lover of the human face seldom displays save when the snow is on the ground, came boldly to her elbow, and began to obey her invitation. "Aha, Rabin, my red-bosomed lover, are ye there? Ye'll find me stiff and streekit under the greenwood bough some morning, and ye mauna stint to deck me out daintily with green leaves, my bonnie man;" and, throwing the bird some more curds, she proceeded to sup the remainder herself, indulging between every mouthful in much bewildered talk.

The interest I took in the poor girl, a few handfuls of nuts—and, above all, a few pleasant glances from one, who (though old and bent and withered now) was once twenty-one, had a handsome leg, and mirth in his eye—obtained me the good graces of the nymphs of Annanwater. Our conversation turned upon poor Judith Macrone.

"She is a poor innocent," said Mary Halliday, "as wild and as harmless as the birds she is feeding. She was ever a singular girl, and wit and folly seem to keep alternate sway over her mind."

"She an innocent!" said Prudence Caird; "she's a cunning and a crafty quean, with a wicked memory and a malicious tongue. It sets her weel to wag her fool tongue at me, and say a word that is nae to my credit."

"Hoot, toot, woman," said one of the fair-haired menials; "we can scarce keep our balance with all the wit we have—what can ye expect o' such an adder cap as crazy Jude? But of all the queans of Annanbank, she is the quean for old-world stories. Set her on a sunny hillside, give her her own will—and, wise or daft, who likes na that?—and she'll clatter ye into a dead sleep, with tales of spirits and apparitions, and the dead who have not peace in the grave and walk the earth for a season. I heard douce John Stroudwater, the Cameronian elder, say that assuredly an evil spirit has filled her head with fool songs and queer lang-sin-syne ballads, by and attour a foreknowledge of coming