Part 3

The May-pole, as we have described it, belonged to the village; but a like usage was kept up by individuals. It was the duty of every lover to go into the woods on the eve or early morn of May-day, and bring thence boughs and garlands, which he either planted before the door of his mistress, or affixed thereto, according to local custom. The particular tree, or _bush_ (this expression meaning no more than bough), preferred for the purpose was the hawthorn, which is properly the tree of May, as blooming in the month the name of which it has in many countries received. A belief in the protective influence of the _white-thorn_, when attached to the house-door, dates back to Roman times. The May-tree, whatever its species, was often adorned with ribbons and silk, with fruit or birds, sometimes with written poems. The lover brought his offering at early dawn, and it was the duty of his mistress to be present at her window and receive it; thus we have in a song of the fifteenth or sixteenth century from the Netherlands--

Fair maiden, lie you still asleep, And let the morning go? Arise, arise, accept the May, That stands here all a-blow.

An English carol alludes to the same practice--

A branch of May I bring to you, Before your door it stands.[19]

The custom was so universal as to give rise to proverbial expressions. Thus, in Italy, "to plant a May at every door" meant to be very susceptible; and in France, to "esmayer" a girl was to court her.

Some of our readers may be surprised to learn that an offshoot of this usage still exists in the United States; the custom, namely, of hanging "May baskets." A half-century since, in Western Massachusetts, a lad would rise early on May-morning, perhaps at three o'clock, and go into the fields. He gathered the trailing arbutus (the only flower there available at the season), and with his best skill made a "basket," by the aid of "winter-green" and similar verdure. This he cautiously affixed to the door of any girl whom he wished to honor. She was left to guess the giver. The practice is still common in many parts of the country, but in a different form. Both boys and girls make "May baskets," and on May-eve attach them to each other's doors, ringing at the same time the house-bell. A pursuit follows, and whoever can capture the responsible person is entitled to a kiss. We do not venture to assert that the latter usage is entirely a corruption of the former.[20]

The term "May-baskets" is no doubt a modernized form of the old English word "May-buskets," employed by Spenser.[21] _Buskets_ are no more than _bushes_--that is, as we have already explained, the flowering branches of hawthorn or other tree, picked early on the May-morn, and used to decorate the house. It seems likely that a misunderstanding of the word changed the fashion of the usage; the American lad, instead of attaching a bough, hung a basket to his sweetheart's door.

A French writer pleasantly describes the customs of which we are speaking, as they exist in his own province of Champagne: "The hours have passed; it is midnight; the doors of the young lads open. Each issues noiselessly. He holds in his hand branches and bouquets, garlands and crowns of flowers. Above the gate of his mistress his hand, trembling with love, places his mysterious homage; then, quietly as he came, he retires, saying, 'Perhaps she has seen me.' ... The day dawns. Up! boys and girls! up! it is the first of May! up, and sing! The young men, decked out with ribbons and wild-flowers, go from door to door to sing the month of May and their love."

Of the morning song and dance about the "bush," or branches of trees planted as we have described, we have evidence in the words of American rhymes. Thus--

As we go round the _mulberry-bush_, _All on a frosty morning_.

In one or two instances, a similar refrain figures in the childish sports of little girls, who have probably got it by imitation; in others, it is the sign of an old May game.[22] An English writer of the sixteenth century alludes to the morning dance in a way which proves that these songs really represent the practice of his time.[23]

The playing of May games was by no means confined to the exact date of the festival. The sign of a country tavern in England was a thorn-bush fixed on a pole, and about this "bush" took place the dance of wedding companies who came to the tavern to feast, whence this post was called the _bride's stake_. Whether the thorn-bush was introduced into the "New English" settlements we cannot say; but the dancing at weddings was common, at least among that portion of those communities which was not bound by the religious restraint that controlled the ruling class. There were, as a French refugee wrote home in 1688, "all kinds of life and manners" in the colonies. In the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 7th May, 1651, the General Court resolved, "Whereas it is observed that there are many abuses and disorders by dauncinge in ordinaryes, whether mixt or unmixt, upon marriage of some persons, this court doth order, that henceforward there shall be no dauncinge upon such occasion, or at other times, in ordinaryes, upon the paine of five shillings, for every person that shall so daunce in ordinaryes." While youth in the cities might be as gay as elsewhere, in many districts the Puritan spirit prevailed, and the very name of dancing was looked on with aversion. But the young people met this emergency with great discretion; they simply called their amusements _playing games_, and under this name kept up many of the rounds which were the time-honored dances of the old country.

The French writer whom we have already had occasion to quote goes on to speak of the customs of the younger girls of his province--the _bachelettes_, as they are called. "On the first of May, dressed in white, they put at their head the sweetest and prettiest of their number. They robe her for the occasion: a white veil, a crown of white flowers adorn her head; she carries a candle in her hand; she is their queen, she is the _Trimouzette_. Then, all together, they go from door to door singing the song of the _Trimouzettes_; they ask contributions for adorning the altar of the Virgin, for celebrating, in a joyous repast, the festival of the Queen of Heaven."

This May procession, which has been the custom of girls for centuries, from Spain to Denmark, existed, perhaps still exists, in New England. Until very recently, children in all parts of the United States maintained the ancient habit of rising at dawn of May-day, and sallying forth in search of flowers. The writer well remembers his own youthful excursions, sometimes rewarded, even in chilly Massachusetts, by the early blue star of the hepatica, or the pink drooping bell of the anemone. The maids, too, had rites of their own. In those days, troops of young girls might still be seen, bareheaded and dressed in white, their May-queen crowned with a garland of colored paper. But common-sense has prevailed at last over poetic tradition; and as an act of homage to east winds, a hostile force more powerful at that period than the breath of Flora, it has been agreed that summer in New England does not begin until June.

These May-day performances, however, were originally no children's custom; in this, as in so many other respects, the children have only proved more conservative of old habit than their elders. There can be no doubt that these are the survivals of the ancient processions of Ceres, Maia, Flora, or by whatever other name the "good goddess," the patroness of the fertile earth, was named, in which she was solemnly borne forth to view and bless the fields. The queen of May herself represents the mistress of Spring; she seems properly only to have overlooked the games in which she took no active part.[24]

A writer of the fifteenth century thus describes the European custom of his day: "A girl adorned with precious garments, seated on a chariot filled with leaves and flowers, was called the queen of May; and the girls who accompanied her as her handmaidens, addressing the youths who passed by, demanded money for their queen. This festivity is still preserved in many countries, especially Spain." The usage survives in the dolls which in parts of England children carry round in baskets of flowers on May-day, requesting contributions.

Of this custom a very poetical example, not noticed by English collectors, has fallen under our own observation. We will suppose ourselves in Cornwall on May-day; the grassy banks of the sunken lanes are gay with the domestic blooms dear to old poetry; the grass is starry with pink and white daisies; the spreading limbs of the beech are clad in verdure, and among the budding elms of the hedge-rows "birds of every sort" "send forth their notes and make great mirth." A file of children, rosy-faced boys of five or six years, is seen approaching; their leader is discoursing imitative music on a wooden fife, to whose imaginary notes the rest keep time with dancing steps. The second and third of the party carry a miniature ship; its cargo, its rigging, are blooms of the season, bluebells and wall-flowers; the ship is borne from door to door, where stand the smiling farmers and their wives; none is too poor to add a penny to the store. As the company vanishes at the turn of the lane, we feel that the merriment of the children has more poetically rendered the charm of the season than even the song of the birds.

There is in America no especial song of the festival, though children at the May parties of which we have spoken still keep up the "springing and leaping" which mediæval writers speak of as practised by them at this occasion. Popular songs are, however, still remembered in Europe, where their burden is, May has come! or, Welcome to May! Pleasing and lyric is the song of the "Trimazos," the lay of the processions of girls to which we have alluded, though its simplicity becomes more formal in our version of the provincial French:

It is the merry month of May, Winter has taken flight; I could not keep my heart at home that bounded for delight: And as I went, and as I came, I sang to the season gay, It is the May, the merry May, the merry month of May!

E'en as I came the meadows by, the wheat-fields have I seen, The hawthorn branches all a-flower, the oat-fields growing green; O Trimazos! It is the May, the merry May, the merry month of May!

Madam, I thank you for your coin, and for your courtesy; It is for Mary and her Babe, and it is not for me: But I will pray the Child for you to whom your gift is given, That he return it you again more royally in heaven.

So, in the Vosges, young girls fasten a bough of laurel to the hat of a young man whom they may meet on the way, wishing

That God may give him health and joy, And the love that he loves best: Take the May, the lovely May.

They ask a gift, but not for themselves:

It shall be for the Virgin Mary, So good and so dear: Take the May, the lovely May.

Corresponding to the French song from which we have quoted is the English May carol, similarly sung from dwelling to dwelling:

Rise up the mistress of this house, with gold along your breast, For the summer springs so fresh, green, and gay; And if your body be asleep, we hope your soul's at rest, Drawing near to the merry month of May.

God bless this house and harbor, your riches and your store, For the summer springs so fresh, green, and gay; We hope the Lord will prosper you, both now and evermore, Drawing near to the merry month of May.

The frequent allusions of the earlier English poets to "doing May observance," or the "rite of May," show us how all ranks of society, in their time, were still animated by the spirit of those primitive faiths to which we owe much of our sensibility to natural impressions. Milton himself, though a Puritan, appears to approve the usages of the season, and even employs the ancient feminine impersonation of the maternal tenderness and bounty of nature, invoking the month:

The flow'ry May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth and youth, and warm desire; Woods and groves are of thy dressing, Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long.

Time, and the changes of taste, have at last proved too strong for the persistency of custom; the practices by which blooming youth expressed its sympathy with the bloom of the year have perished, taking with them much of the poetry of the season, and that inherited sentiment which was formerly the possession of the ignorant as well as of the cultivated class.

IV.

_THE INVENTIVENESS OF CHILDREN._

In the days of childhood new, When Time had years and ours were few, Here on grassy fields at play, Ran we this, the other way; On this very meadow-ground First violets found, Where the cattle graze to-day.

_Minnesinger, 13th Century._

The student of popular traditions is accustomed to recognize the most trifling incidents of a tale, or the phrases of a song, as an adaptation of some ancient or foreign counterpart, perhaps removed by an interval of centuries. It is the same with rhymes of the sort included in this collection, in which formulas of sport, current in our own day and in the New World, will be continually found to be the legacy of other generations and languages. Should we then infer that childhood, devoid of inventive capacity, has no resource but mechanical repetition?

We may, on the contrary, affirm that children have an especially lively imagination. Observe a little girl who has attended her mother for an airing in some city park. The older person, quietly seated beside the footpath, is half absorbed in revery; takes little notice of passers-by, or of neighboring sights or sounds, further than to cast an occasional glance which may inform her of the child's security. The other, left to her own devices, wanders contented within the limited scope, incessantly prattling to herself; now climbing an adjoining rock, now flitting like a bird from one side of the pathway to the other. Listen to her monologue, flowing as incessantly and musically as the bubbling of a spring; if you can catch enough to follow her thought, you will find a perpetual romance unfolding itself in her mind. Imaginary personages accompany her footsteps; the properties of a childish theatre exist in her fancy; she sustains a conversation in three or four characters. The roughnesses of the ground, the hasty passage of a squirrel, the chirping of a sparrow, are occasions sufficient to suggest an exchange of impressions between the unreal figures with which her world is peopled. If she ascends, not without a stumble, the artificial rockwork, it is with the expressed solicitude of a mother who guides an infant by the edge of a precipice; if she raises her glance to the waving green overhead, it is with the cry of pleasure exchanged by playmates who trip from home on a sunshiny day. The older person is confined within the barriers of memory and experience; the younger breathes the free air of creative fancy.

A little older grown, such a child becomes the inventor of legend. Every house, every hill in the neighborhood, is the locality of an adventure. Every drive includes spots already famous in supposed history, and passes by the abodes of fancied acquaintances. Into a land with few traditions the imagination of six years has introduced a whole cycle of romance.

If the family or vicinity contains a group of such minds, fancy takes outward form in dramatic performance. The school history is vitalized into reality; wars are waged and battles performed in a more extended version, while pins and beans signify squadrons and regiments. Romances are acted, tales of adventure represented with distribution of rôles. Thus, in a family of our acquaintance, the children treasured up wood-engravings, especially such as were cut from the illustrated journals: runaway horses, Indian chiefs, and trappers of the wilderness were at an especial premium. These they stored in boxes, encamped in different corners of the room, and performed a whole library of sensational tales. A popular piece set forth the destruction of the villain of the story by a shark, while navigating a _catamaran_. The separated beds of the sleeping-room represented the open planks of the raft; the gentlest and most compliant character personified the malefactor; and the shark swam between the bedsteads.

Where sports require or allow such freedom, the ingenuity of children puts to shame the dulness of later years, and many a young lady of twenty would find it impossible to construct the dialogue which eight summers will devise without an effort. It was a favorite amusement of two girls just entering their teens to conduct a boarding-school. The scholars and the teachers of the imaginary school were all named, and these characters were taken in dialogue by the little actors, each sustaining several perfectly well-defined parts. The pupils pursued their pleasures and their studies according to their several tastes; while their progress, their individual accomplishments and offences, were subsequently gravely discussed by the instructors, and the condition, prospects, and management of the institution talked over. Thus, hour after hour, without hesitation or weariness, the conversation proceeded, with the duo of friends for actors and audience!

Oftentimes, with young children, an outward support is required for fancy, an object to be mentally transformed. One set of little girls collected in the fall birch-leaves, changed to yellow, out of which alone they created their little nursery. Another party employed pins, which they inserted in a board, and called pin-fairies. By the aid of these, long dramatizations were performed, costumes devised, and palaces decorated, under regulations rigidly observed.

Such exercises of imagination are usually conducted in strict privacy, and unremarked, or not understood, by parents; but when the attention of the latter is directed to these performances, they are often astonished by the readiness they disclose, and are apt to mistake for remarkable talent what is only the ease of the winged fancy of youth, which flies lightly to heights where later age must laboriously mount step by step.

As infancy begins to speak by the free though unconscious combination of linguistic elements, so childhood retains in language a measure of freedom. A little attention to the jargons invented by children might have been serviceable to certain philologists. Their love of originality finds the tongue of their elders too commonplace; besides, their fondness for mystery requires secret ways of communication. They therefore often create (so to speak) new languages, which are formed by changes in the mother-speech, but sometimes have quite complicated laws of structure, and a considerable arbitrary element.

The most common of these, which are classified by young friends under the general name of _gibberish_, goes in New England by the name of "Hog Latin." It consists simply in the addition of the syllable _ery_, preceded by the sound of hard _g_, to every word. Even this is puzzling to older persons, who do not at first perceive that "Wiggery youggery goggery wiggery miggery" means only "Will you go with me!" Children sometimes use this device so perpetually that parents fear lest they may never recover the command of their native English. When it ceases to give pleasure, new dialects are devised. Certain young friends of ours at first changed the termination thus--"Withus yoovus govus withus meevus?" which must be answered, "Ivus withus govus withus yoovus;" the language, seemingly, not admitting a direct affirmative. The next step was to make a more complicated system by prefixing a _u_ (or _oo_) sound with a vowel suffix. Thus, "Will you go with me to lunch?" would be "Uwilla uoa ugoa uwitha umea utoa uluncha?" But this contrivance, adopted by all the children of a neighborhood,[25] was attended with variations incapable of reduction to rule, but dependent on practice and instinct. The speech could be learned, like any other, only by experience; and a little girl assured us that she could not comprehend a single word until, in the course of a month, she had learned it by ear. She added, in regard to a particular dialect, that it was much harder than French, and that her brother had to think a great deal when he used it. The application of euphonic rules was more or less arbitrary. Thus, _understand_ would be _uery-uinste_. The following will answer for a specimen of a conversation between a child and a nurse who has learned the tongue: "Uery uisy uemy uity?" "Up-stairs, on the screen in your room." The child had asked, "Where is my hat?"

A group of children living near Boston invented the _cat language_, so called because its object was to admit of free intercourse with cats, to whom it was mostly talked, and by whom it was presumed to be comprehended. In this tongue the cat was naturally the chief subject of nomenclature; all feline positions were observed and named, and the language was rich in such epithets, as Arabic contains a vast number of expressions for _lion_. Euphonic changes were very arbitrary and various, differing for the same termination; but the adverbial ending _ly_ was always _osh_; _terribly_, _tirriblosh_. A certain percentage of words were absolutely independent, or at least of obscure origin. The grammar tended to Chinese or infantine simplicity; _ta_ represented any case of any personal pronoun. A proper name might vary in sound according to the euphonic requirement of the different Christian-names by which it was preceded. There were two dialects, one, however, stigmatized as _provincial_.

This invention of language must be very common, since other cases have fallen under our notice in which children have composed dictionaries of such.

It would be strange if children who exhibit so much inventive talent did not contrive new games; and we find accordingly that in many families a great part of the amusements of the children are of their own devising. The earliest age of which the writer has authentic record of such ingenuity is two and a half years.

Considering the space which our Indian tribes occupy in the imagination of young Americans, it is remarkable that the red man has no place whatever in the familiar and authorized sports. On the other hand, savage life has often furnished material for individual and local amusements.

Near the country place of a family within our knowledge was a patch of brushwood containing about forty acres, and furnishing an admirable ground for savage warfare. Accordingly, a regular game was devised. The players were divided into Indians and hunters, the former uttering their war-cry in such dialect as youthful imagination regarded as aboriginal. The players laid ambushes for each other in the forest, and the game ended with the extermination of one party or the other. This warfare was regulated by strict rules, the presentation of a musket at a fixed distance being regarded as equivalent to death.

In a town of Massachusetts, some thirty years since, it was customary for the school-girls, during recess, to divide themselves into separate tribes. Shawls spread over tent-poles represented Indian lodges, and a girl always resorted to her allotted habitation. This was kept up for the whole summer, and carried out with such earnestness that girls belonging to hostile tribes, though otherwise perfectly good friends, would often not speak to each other for weeks, in or out of school.