Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/418

 386 Correspondence.

was a saying you should never leave clothes out to dry on New- Year's-Eve. If you did drops of blood would be found on them in the morning.

If I remember rightly, such drops of blood fall in France when the equivalent of the German Wild Hunt rages through the air.

Does not Tille consider that the custom of the Christmas-tree did not prevail in ancient times, because he has failed to find any mention of it in literature of an earlier date?

If he is correct the English Christmas-bough, or Christmas-bush, must have originated apart from the German tree, both descending from his ancestral rod or twig of blessing, but in different lines.

But how far may lack of evidence be trusted ? How little we know of English November-fires before the Gunpowder Plot. Yet the probability is that we had autumnal-fires long before the days

of Guy Fawkes.

M. Peacock.

Nursery Rhymes.

The rhymes in Folk-Lore, vol. xxiv. p. 74 ^/ seq., recall several which I heard as a child, but did not know to be old or popular. I give the provenance of each as nearly as I know it.

(i) Cf. p. 81. — This I often heard from my mother who was born about 1852 near Ballyshannon. Hence the version is probably Northern Irish. Unfortunately I have forgotten several lines. What I can remember runs :

" There was a man of double deed, Who sowed a garden full of seed ; When the seed began to grow, He sowed a garden full of snow. When the snow began to melt, He sowed a garden full of felt (? spelt)."

Some lines which followed I have forgotten ; the rhyme then goes on, " Like an eagle in the sky," and so, omitting '' 'twas ' in all cases down to " Like a stick about your back," where it ends, the last line being given very emphatically, and accompanied with a pretence of a slap.