Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/495

 Correspondence. 449

Irish concurring in one view of the effect of a rite, in opposition to the ancient North Irish, who are found to have held a totally different view.

I should like to know in what parts of Brittany this custom is, or used to be, practised. The North Bretons must be closely akin to the South Welsh : they understand one another without an interpreter.

E. Sidney Hartland.

F0LK.-S0NG Refrain.

Not long ago I heard the nursery song, " Froggy would a- wooing go," sung in Ripon with the following refrain :

" Kiminary keemo, Kiminary keemo.

Klminary kiltikary, Kiminary keemo. String stram pammadilly, lamma pamma rat tag, Ring dong boniminnanny Iveemo."

Are these syllables slang, or Romany, or some old lesson, or an attempt to render other sounds, musical or natural, or only very sonorous gibberish ? A variant of them may be found in Mr. Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Tales (1892), p. 72 (illustra- tion); cf. note, p. 236.

H. M, Bower.

The Fifth of November and Guy Fawkes. (Vol. xiv., pp. 89-91, 175-6, 185-8.)

In Guernsey Folk-Lore, edited by Edith F. Carey from MSS. of the late Sir Edgar MacCuUoch (1903), p. 36, I read:

" On the last night of the year it was customary (and the practice has not altogether fallen into desuetude) for boys to dress up a grotesque figure, which they called " Le vieux bout