Bell, Bessy, and Mary Gray, the “twa bonnie lassies” of a Scotch ballad, daughters of two Perthshire gentlemen, who in 1666 built themselves a bower in a spot retired from a plague then raging; supplied with food by a lad in love with both of them, who caught the plague and gave it to them, of which they all sickened and died.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Bell, Andrew, LL.D. * Bell, Book, and Candle