G'day again,

I suppose I should remark that this particular song shows how, sometimes, searching back to the oldest reference you have can be counter-productive! When Phyl first asked me about this song, I looked at my old, worn and travel-weary copy of Merry Muses of Caledonia ... and couldn't find any reference. Fortunately, I had picked up a newer edition, in the '70s or early '80s, which proved to be the same as the one from which Phyl was working.

The two songs by Burns (err - not Bums ... the well-known OCR scanning error that seems to have slipped through my bleary, hot steamy midnight, proof-read!) referred to in the text, above, had only been located and anthologised by Legman a decade before. Who knows what else is still lurking in some dusty bundle of manuscript papers (probably in the vast research collection of an American University Library)?

Regards,

Bob