Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/255

 Rh a stave through his body, having committed suicide. It is not always good to investigate the past too closely.

"Jenny Jones" in America becomes Miss Jennia Jones, "Jennia" being understood to be a contraction of "Virginia"! Mr. Newell thinks that Jones was originally Jo (joy, "joie"), an old English word for sweetheart. He is further of the opinion that the song was in the first place a love-tale of the kind of the well-known Venetian Rosetina. Taking this view, there is another southern love-ballad which seems to have a sort of affinity with "Jenny," the "Bela Sabè" or "Belle Isabelle" of the Mediterranean coast. It will be remembered that the symbolical sense of different colours plays a chief part in all versions of "Jenny Jones"; one colour after another is proposed but rejected as unsuitable; at last black is accepted in the English text and white in the American— white being "for death" or "for angels." Subjoined is a literal transcript of "Bela Sabe":

Playing at death and at mourning is a very old game, perhaps one of the oldest of all. I have no doubt that the little children of Judæa played at something like "Jenny Jones," and that to this refers the