Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/110

92 example: Q. 'My hen has laid among thorns?' A. 'A pineapple.' From West Africa, this Yoruba one: Q. 'A long slender trading woman who never gets to market?' A. 'A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).' In Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. Q. 'There are four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?' A. 'The Samoan pillow,' which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four legs. Q. 'A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to the heavens? ' A. 'The smoke of the oven.' Q. 'A man who stands between two ravenous fish?' A. 'The tongue.' (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas: Q. 'What are the ten stones one has at his sides?' A. 'The finger-nails.' Q. 'What is it we get into by three parts and out of by one?' A. 'A shirt.' Q. 'What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after it?' A. 'A needle.'

These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting, into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, 'What is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?' (the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: 'Long legs, crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,' is primitive enough to have been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles: 'A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here they go, there they go; Now they stand still?' Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: 'Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, And a long tail which she let fly;