In Germany we meet with the "Easter-Hare" (Oster-Hase). In many parts of that country the custom prevails at or about Easter-tide of hiding in the garden, or in the house, eggs, which, the children are told, have been laid by the "Easter-hare." Another curious term met with in northeastern Germany is "hare-bread" (Hasenbrod). In Quedlinburg this name is given to bread (previously placed there intentionally by the parents) picked up by children when out walking with their parents or elders. In Lüneburg it is applied to dry bread given a hungry child with an exhortation to patience. In the first case, the little one is told that the hare has lost it, and in the second, that it has been taken away from him. The name "hare-bread" is also given to bread brought home by the parents or elders, when returning from a journey, the children being told that it has been taken away from the hare.
In the shadow-pictures made on the wall for the amusement of children the rabbit again appears, and the hare figures also in children's games.
Squirrel.
According to the belief of certain Indians of Vancouver Island, there once lived "a monstrous old woman with wolfish teeth, and finger-nails like claws." She used to entice away little children whom she afterwards ate up. One day a mother, who was about to lose her child thus, cried out to the spirits to save her child in any way or form. Her prayer was answered, and "The Great Good Father, looking down upon the Red Mother, pities her; lo! the child's soft brown skin turns to fur, and there slides from the ogress's grip, no child, but the happiest, liveliest, merriest little squirrel of all the West,—but bearing, as its descendants still bear, those four dark lines along the back that show where the cruel claws ploughed into it escaping" (396. III. 52-54).
Elsewhere, also, the squirrel is associated with childhood. Familiar is the passage in Longfellow's Hiawatha, where the hero speaks to the squirrel, who has helped him out of a great difficulty:—
"Take the thanks of Hiawatha,
And the name which now he gives you;
For hereafter, and forever,
Boys shall call you adjidaumo,
Tail in air the boys shall call you."
Seals.
Those noble and indefatigable missionaries, the Moravians, have more than once been harshly criticised in certain quarters, because, in their versions of the Bible, in the Eskimo language, they saw fit to substitute for some of the figurative expressions employed in our rendering, others more intelligible to the aborigines. In the New Testament Christ is termed the "Lamb of God," but since, in the Arctic home of the Innuit, shepherds and sheep are alike unknown, the translators, by a most felicitous turn of language, rendered the phrase by "little seal of God," a figure that appealed at once to every Eskimo, young and old, men and women; for what sheep were to the dwellers on the Palestinian hillsides, seals are to this northernmost of human races. Rink tells us that the Eskimo mother "reserves the finest furs for her new-born infant," while the father keeps for it "the daintiest morsels from the chase," and, "to make its eyes beautiful, limpid, and bright, he gives it seal's eyes to eat" (523. 37).
Fish.
Mrs. Bramhall tells us how in Japan the little children, playing about the temples, feed the pet fishes of the priests in the temple-lake. At the temple of the Mikado, at Kioto, she saw "six or eight little boys and girls … lying at full length on the bank of the pretty lake." The fishes were called up by whistling, and the children fed them by holding over the water their open hands full of crumbs (189. 65). Other inhabitants of the sea and the waters of the earth are brought into early relation with children.