"The Wife of Usher's Well" is a traditional ballad, catalogued as Child Ballad 79 and number 196 in the Roud Folk Song Index. An incomplete version appeared in Sir Walter Scott's "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (1802). It is composed of three fragments. They were notated from an old woman in West Lothian. The Scottish tune is quite different from the English tune, and America produced yet another tune. William Motherwell also printed a version in "Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern" (1827). Cecil Sharp collected songs from Britain but had to go the Appalachian Mountains to locate this ballad. He found 8 versions and 9 fragments. In the first half of the twentieth century many more versions were collected in America. The ballad concerns a woman from Usher's Well, who sends her three sons away, to school in some versions, and a few weeks after learns that they had died. The woman grieves bitterly for the loss of her children, cursing the winds and sea. "I wish the wind may never cease, Nor flashes in the flood, Till my three sons come home to me, In earthly flesh and blood." The song implicitly draws on an old belief that one should mourn a death for a year and a day, for any longer may cause the dead to return; it has this in common with the ballad "The Unquiet Grave". When, around Martinmas, the children return to their mother they do so as revenants, not, as she hoped, "in earthly flesh and blood", and it is a bleak affair. They wear hats made of birch. The children are dead but wear birch wood. The symbolism here is unclear. Conventionally birch protects the living from the dead not the other way round. The birch comes from a tree that grows at the gates of Paradise. The mother expects a joyous reunion, in some versions preparing a celebratory feast for them, which, as subjects of Death, they are unable to eat. They consistently remind her that they are no longer living; they are unable to sleep as well and must depart at the break of day. "The cock doth craw, the day doth daw, The channerin worm doth chide; Gin we be mist out o our place, A sair pain we maun bide." The most popular versions in America have a different tone and an overtly religious nature. They return at Christmas rather