th of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of
Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and
fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the
Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:

'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht,
And they waded through red bluid to the knee;
For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth
Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'

The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and
there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the
Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never
lie.'

'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said;
"A goodlie gift you would give me;
I neither dought to buy or sell
At fair or tryst where I may be;
I dought neither speak to prince or peer
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'

But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day
upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on
Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.

Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and
greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and
Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy
Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's
conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds
tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be
traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother
Eve:

'Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little abune her knee;
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little abune her bree;
And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh
As fast as she could gae.'

There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly
knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to
fairyland:

'There cam' a wind out o' the north,
A sharp wind and a snell;
A deep sleep cam' over me
And from my horse I fell';

as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he
also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on
Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her
child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north
wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's
love: