The story is based on a 200-year old ballad popular in Newar society.

It was an old ballad about the little village in the pine forest, the girl, the young man.

And he'd been playing old Russian ballads to a ghost.

Some also believe, based on an old ballad, that she divorced Thomas during this time.

When I was a boy you use to chant the old ballads for my grandfather.

It seems to me fanciful, fantastic, like an old ballad.

It is said to be "written in imitation of an old Scottish ballad on a similar subject".

Didn't all the old ballads claim when magic failed, plain common sense would save the day?

But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless ballad not far off.

Among the upper-class families many of the old French ballads have been preserved.