True enough. . . and I do make more of the kinship between the two ballads (Eppie Morrie and Rob Roy) than Child does; in fact, he doesn't say much at all about the single text he gives of the first while devoting pages and pages to eleven variants of the second -- all of them very definitely based on the abduction of Jean Key by Rob Oig (or "junior") in 1750.   But what Child does say encourages further speculation. Maidmont (his single source for Eppie Morrie) "does not tell us where the ballad came from, and no other editor seems to know of it. Two stanzas . . . occur in a copy of Rob Roy . . . which had once been in Maidmont's hands and perhaps was obtained from the same region."    So kinship is not ruled out, though of course it's the imaginative kinship that intrigues me.....