Do Roberts and Barrand name their source for The Wife Of Usher's Well?  As Hotspur says, verses 8 and 9 don't belong there at all, and have clearly come from King Pharim (or its predecessor, The Carnal and the Crane); the second version that Joe points to -collected in New England in 1951, but virtually identical in text to that given in The Oxford Book of Ballads, itself taken from Sir Walter Scott's published version of 1833/4- has a more coherent narrative.  The substitution (maybe the result of an accidental association of ideas on the part of the source-singer) unfortunately turns a tragic ballad into something closer to farce!  I do hope that Roberts and Barrand didn't do it on purpose.

Malcolm