Note 49 — 200 THE GYPSY LADDIE

Sharp, in Johnson’s Museum, 1853, IV, 218*; Paterson, in Ballads and Songs of Ayrshire, I, 13. It is also clear from these letters that the countess was a sober and religious woman. Some minor difficulties which attend the supposition of this lady’s absconding with Johnny Faa, or any gypsy, are barely worth mentioning. At the time when Johnny Faa was put down, in 1624, the countess was seventeen years old, and yet she is made the mother of two children. If we shift the elopement to the other end of her life, there was then (so severe had been the measures taken with these limmers) perhaps not a gypsy left in Scotland. See Aytoun, 1859, I, 186.