Note 115 — 217 THE BROOM OF COWDENKNOWS
Reading edition
The attempt to lessen the disproportion of the match seems to me a decidedly modern trait. In H 27, 28, this goes so far that the maid has twenty ploughs and three against the laird’s thirty and three. In M 3–5, the maid’s father was once a landed laird, but gambles away his estate, and then both father and mother take to drinking!