+The Text+ is from the lost Fraser-Tytler-Brown MS., this ballad luckily
having been transcribed before the MS. disappeared. Mrs. Brown recited
another and a fuller version to Jamieson.
+The Story.+--Willie's mother, a witch, displeased at her son's choice,
maliciously arrests by witchcraft the birth of Willie's son. Willie's
travailing wife sends him again and again to bribe the witch, who
refuses cup, steed, and girdle. Here our version makes such abrupt
transitions, that it will be well to explain what takes place. The Belly
Blind or Billie Blin (see _Young Bekie_, First Series, pp. 6, 7) advises
Willie to make a sham baby of wax, and invite his witch-mother to the
christening. Willie does so (in stanzas lost between our 33 and 34); the
witch, believing the wax-baby to be flesh and blood, betrays all her
craft by asking who has loosed the knots, ta'en out the kaims, ta'en
down the woodbine, etc., these being the magic rites by which she has
suspended birth. Willie instantly looses the knots and takes out the
kaims, and his wife presents him with a bonny young son.
The story is common in Danish ballads, and occasional in Swedish. In the
classics, Juno (Hera) on two occasions delayed childbirth and cheated
Ilithyia, the sufferers being Latona and Alcmene. But the latest version
of the story is said to have occurred in Arran in the nineteenth
century. A young man, forsaking his sweetheart, married another maiden,
who when her time came suffered exceedingly. A packman who chanced to be
passing heard the tale and suspected the cause. Going to the discarded
sweetheart, he told her that her rival had given birth to a fine child;
thereupon she sprang up, pulled a large nail out of the beam, and called
to her mother, 'Muckle good your craft has done!' The labouring wife was
delivered forthwith. (See _The Folklore Record_, vol. ii. p. 117.)