And when he sleeps, leave off, yet rest when the sun overpowers.
Blest, O youths, is the life of a frog, for he never is anxious
Who is to pour him his drink, for he always has plenty.
Better at once, O miserly steward, to boil our lentils;
Mind you don't cut your fingers in trying to chop them to atoms.
These are the songs for the toilers to sing in the heat of the harvest.
Most modern harvest songs manage, like that of Theocritus, to convey some hint of thirst or hunger. "Be merry, O comrades!" sing the girl reapers of Casteignano dei Greci, a Greek settlement in Terra d'Otranto, "Be merry, and go not on your way so downcast; I saw things you cannot see; I saw the housewife kneading dough, or preparing macaroni; and she does it for us to eat, so that we may work like lions at the harvest, and rejoice the heart of the husbandman." This may be a statement of fact or a suggestion of what ought to be a fact. Other songs, sung exclusively at the harvest, bear no outward sign of connection with it; and the reason of their use on that occasion is hopelessly lost.
IV.
I pass on to the old curiosity shop of popular traditions—the nursery. Children, with their innate conservatism, have stored a vast assemblage of odds and ends which fascinate by their very incompleteness. Religion, mythology, history, physical science, or what stood for it; the East, the North—those great banks of ideas—have been impartially drawn on by the infant folk-lorists at their nurses' knees. Children in the four quarters of the globe, repeat the same magic formulæ; words which to every grown person seem devoid of sense, have a universality denied to any articles of faith. What, for example, is the meaning of the play with the snail? Why is he so persistently asked to put his horns out? Pages might be filled with the variants of the well-known invocation which has currency from Rome to Pekin.