Note 1 — SLAINS CASTLE.
Reading edition
Footnote 1:
(return)
There is another version of her courtship, and this a metrical one. This old ballad was not much known beyond the district round Slains, and the old servants and farmers on the estate were the chief depositaries of the tradition. I have failed to secure more than a very small fragment of it, which is itself only written down from memory by one of these old women. The rhyme and rhythm are both original:
Lady Mary Hay went to a wedding Near the famous town of Reading: There a gentleman she saw That belonged to the law....
Here evidently there occurs a hiatus, during which some account is probably begun of her unreturned attachment, for a little later we find in the very primitive manuscript from which we quote these words of the countess:
I that have so many slighted, I am at last—(unrequited?)
The story is now carried on in prose (my informant having forgotten the text of the ballad), and says that "Lady Mary wanted or challenged him to meet her in a masquerade" (probably meaning a duel in disguise), "and that his father told him to go." Neither father nor son seems to have known the fair challenger's rank, though the following words point to their being aware of her sex, for the elder Falconer is represented as saying,
If she is rich she will raise your fame, And if poor you are the same.