Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/234

230 had never married a fairer pair. The bridegroom's mother was a proud dame, of the ancient house of Morison. She took it sore to heart that her son should marry a miller's daughter; she forbade him, under pain of the mother's curse—and a woman's curse, they say, is a sore one—to bed with his bride under a churl's roof-tree, and, as he wished to be happy, to bring her home to his father's house on the night of the wedding.

"Now, ye will consider that the house of the bride stood on one hillside, and the home of the bridegroom on another; while between them, in the bosom of the valley, lay no less a water than the Annan, with its bank knee-deep in snow, and its surface plated with ice. The mirk winter night and the mother's scorn did not prevent one of the blithesomest bridals from taking place that ever a piper played to or a maiden danced in. Ye have never seen, sir, one of our inland merry-makings, and seen the lads and the lasses moving merrily to the sound of the fiddle and the harpstring, else ye might have some notion of the mirth at Margaret's bridal. The young were loudest in their joy, but the old were blither at the heart; and men forgot their white heads and women that they were granddames, and who so glad as they? An old man, one of the frank-hearted Bells of Middlebee, wiped his brow as he sat down from a reel, and said: 'Aweel, Mary, my bonnie lass, there are just three things which intoxicate the heart of man: first, there is strong drink; secondly, there is music; and thirdly, there is the company of beautiful women, when they move to the sound of dulcimer and flute. Blest be the Maker, for they are the most wonderful of all His works.'

"But the merriest, as well as the fairest, was the bride herself: she danced with unequalled life and grace—her feet gave the tone, rather than took it, from the fiddle; and the old men said the melody of her feet, as they moved on the floor, would do more mischief among men's hearts than her eyes, and her eyes were wondrous bright ones. Many stayed from dancing themselves, and stood in a circle round the place where she danced. I listened to their remarks, which the catastrophe of the evening impressed on my memory. 'I think,' said William Johnstone of Chapelknowe, 'our bonnie bride's possessed; I never saw her look so sweet or dance so delightfully. It's no sonsie to look so smiling on her wedding-night; a grave bride's best, owre blithe a bride is seldom a blest one.' 'There's no a sweeter or more modest