Postcard illustrating "Comin Thro the Rye"

A colour tinted  postcard from a photograph of a scene from the song "Comin Thro the Rye".   This postcard illustrates the stanza beginning, "Gin a body meet a body, Comin frae the well." A couple are posed in an embrace, they wear a theatrical version of late 18th century rural dress. The "well", however, is a pump and the girl carries galvanised buckets, both contemporary with the postcard rather than the song.   Robert Burns' only published version of this old Scottish song does not actually contain the stanza, "...Comin frae the well...", but "Comin Thro the Rye" is popularly believed to be his work. There were many versions of it around even at the time he wrote it down - some particularly bawdy.   The theme of the postcard, combining associations with Burns, quaint "scottishness" and an element of the risqué would have been particularly attractive to the publisher, Bauermeister of Glasgow, who published this as part of a series called "Scotch Wooing".