Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/304

268 on. If your baby is coming from the Weser you can tell whether it is going to be a boy or a girl, for the water-carriers bring the girls in the white, and the boys in the black and red buckets. In Brunswick, the clever lady who brings the babies fetches them from the wells, and for this reason she is called Borneller (from Born or Brunnen, a well). On the island of Amrum, off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, there are two baby-wells. When the woman (I wonder if she is one of the Norns!) in charge of these wells is asked for a baby she has to wake it up from its sleep with a scythe. This is a very awkward implement to use, to be sure, and just as we might expect, while she is watching carefully so as not to hurt the baby, she forgets all about mother, who, in consequence, is almost always badly cut, and so has to go to bed every time a baby comes. In Cologne, Kunibert's well it is that supplies the babies; and in Hesse, if the children peer into the watery mirror of a well, like Narcissus, they will see the babies waiting for the stork to come. In Bohemia, if you want babies, all you have to do is to fish them out of the wells with nets; but sometimes they get about in the fields, where, like the prince in the fairy-tale, they take the form of ordinary frogs.

In Nierstein things are a little different. There the baby is got from a great big lime-tree, the original of the English gooseberry-bush, which the learned have agreed to call Yggdrasil, but there also, if you listen quietly beside the tree, you will hear a spring gurgling out from its roots. And, indeed, there was a well called Wurdh that lay under Yggdrasil. (According to a fuller version of the legend, there were three springs under the life-tree, one gushing out of each root, Udarbrunr, Mimisbrunr, and Hvergelmir.)

In Brunswick, the Gode wells in the town furnish the babies, and in Frankisch-Henneburg they come from