Down by yon garden green / The Laird Of Waristoun

This version was taken down by Sir Walter Scott from his mother's recitation, for Jamieson's book of ballads. Jamieson later quarrelled bitterly with Sir Walter, as letters at Abbotsford prove. A variant is given by Kinloch, and a longer, less poetical, but more historically accurate version is given by Buchan. The House of Waristoun is, or lately was, a melancholy place hanging above a narrow lake, in the northern suburbs of Edinburgh, n ear the Water of Leith.

Kincaid was the name of the Laird; according to Chambers, the more famous lairds of Covenanting times were Johnstons. Kincaid is said to have treated his wife cruelly, wherefore she, or her nurse, engaged one Robert Weir, an old servant of her father (Livingstone of Dunipace), to strangle the unhappy man in his own bedroom (July 2, 1600). The lady was beheaded, the nurse was burned, and, later, Weir was also executed. The line "I wish that ye may sink for sin" occurs in an earlier ballad on Edinburgh Castle - "And that all for the black dinner Earl Douglas got therein." - A Collection of Ballads by Andrew Lang