Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/542

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. XL JUNE 5, im

COUNTING-OUT RIMES IN ORKNEY. Most of the following are variants of well-known rimes, but one or two may be purely local :

1. Leekie ma law, leekie ma la,

Who is the man to be crowned with stra' ? 2. Oh, who will be king in this little game ?

Oli, who will be king ? I say.

Oh, who will be king in this little game,

A king's part for to play ? You !

-o. I have a grandmother down in Leith ; She has four-and-twenty teeth. One fell out, and one fell in ; T choose you for that one in.

A. Ena, dena, dasha, doma, Hong, pong, toss.

-5. Eetie, peetie, penny pie ; Poppie, lottie, jinkim jie ; Stand thou out there by.

<!. Eetum, peetum, penny pie, Pop a larum, jinkim ji, White pudden', black trout, I choose thee first one out.

7. Eetle, ottle, black bottle ; Eetle, ottle, out.

. Eeckie, ocky, black bokie ;

Eekie, ocky, out.

If you had been to black bokie

You would not have been put out. A. Rich stick, stickity ho !

Catch the nigger by the toe ;

Pick, pick, pickity ho !

Be sure you don't let the nigger go.

There are many versions of the well- known " One-ery, two-ery," which Leland thought might be corrupted Romani : 10. One-ery, two-ery, ticcery, seven, Alaby, crackaby, ten and eleven ; Ping, pang, muskey, dan, Tweedledom, toddledom, twenty-one.

ALEX. RUSSELL. ktromness, Orkney.

WRECKERS IN BRITTANY. I take the

following from ' Le Folk-lore de France,' ii.

142-4, which quotes various authorities :

''I. 11 discussing the Pilteura du mer of Brittany,

Sebillot recounts that on the coast of Finisterre

prayers were offered for wrecks, and the pilleurs

thanked the Virgin for having sent them a

I U1 * U l ^llage. The people of Ushant declared

that their neighbours of the island of Molene

who, however, denied it, addressed the following

orison to their saints :

Madame Mary of Molene,

To my island send a wreck ;

And you, Monsieur Saint Renan,

Do not send one only :

Send rather two, three,

So that each may have a little. "According to a tradition of the La Hague country (Manche), masses a gravage (wreck) were formerly said in many churches of the region. Boucher de Perthes relates that in the north of fcrnisterre, towards 1820, people had a mass

celebrated for the year to be fortunate in wrecks, and that they had been seen walking in pro- cession on the shore, chanting litanies to obtain the same favour. A legend of the neighbourhood of Penmarc'h presents a curious amalgam of antique superstitions and Christian observances ....

" The pilleurs de mer did not limit themselves to uttering prayers ; they drew vessels to their destruction by false lights, and this criminal practice was not only in use in the Middle Ages, but at epochs fairly near our own time. The coast of Brittany, and above all that of the extremity of Finisterre, had a worse reputation than the others. A traveller said in 1636 : the island of Sain or of Sizun is at present inhabited by savage people who fall upon the wrecks, living by their debris, and lighting fires in their island, in perilous places, to cause wreck to those passing the raz .... In Normandy, and above all in Low-Brittany, they suspended a light between the two horns of a cow ; then the animal was hampered in her movements by a tether knotted to a cord and to her leg, which obliged her, when taken along the cliffs or dune, to lower her head obliquely at each step. On the coast of Saintonge, and principally in the isle of Oleron, he who made the ass pitch, after having put beneath his clothing a belt of male-fern gathered at St. John's-tide, to assure himself of luck, tied a lighted lantern to the neck of a donkey whose feet were slightly hobbled by the aid of a rope, and the animal, led along the shore, made the light, which from a distance appeared to be on board a vessel, oscillate. The sailors who, after the wreck, reached the shore, were taken, stripped, massacred, or thrown into the

waves On many points of the coast of

Brittany, it is told that these false fires were the cause of the death of sailors of the country, and that mothers guilty of having lured with these lights saw the waves throw the corpse of their own child up on the strand."

See also pp. 145 and 146.

It may be asked what the lords of the manors, who would have their own claims on flotsam and jetsam, were doing to allow this kind of thing, and why the chief authority of the country permitted trade by sea to be thus crippled. Again, though the Bretons may take their religion with a decided admixture of pre-Christian super- stition, is it credible that " towards 1820 " a priest could have been found to offer a mass for luck in wrecking (unless he were duped), or that any cure would have tolerated the singing of litanies with such an object ?

M. P.

THE BLACK GUARD. If I mistake not, the subjoined quotation antedates by some twenty years the earliest mention of the above, as recorded in the ' N.E.D.' :

1513. ' A Chronicle, in ' Songs, Carols/ &e. Lord Amerall, with his maryners, callyd, ' the gard.' "
 * E.E.T.S. cl.), p. 157 : "at }>at fild [Flodden] was my

H. P. L.