Few beads are best when once we go a-maying.
People neglect their "beads" or the equivalents now from other motives.
May night is the German Walpurgis-nacht. The witches ride up to the Brocken on magpies' tails, not a magpie can be seen for the next twenty-four hours—they are all gone and they have not had time to return. The witches dance on the Brocken till they have danced away the winter's snow. May-brides and May-kings are still to be heard of in Germany, and children run about on May-day with buttercups or with a twist of bread, a Bretzel, decked with ribbons, or holding imprisoned may-flies, which they let loose whilst they sing:
Maïkäferchen fliege,
Dein Vater ist in kriege,
Deine Mutter ist in Pommerland,
Pommerland ist abgebrannt,
Maïkäferchen fliege.
May chafer must fly away home, his father is at the wars, his mother is in Pomerania, Pomerania is all burnt. May chafer in short is the brother of our ladybird. Dr Karl Blind is of opinion that "Pommerland" is a later interpolation for "Holler-land"—the land of Freya—Holda, the Teutonic Aphrodite; and he and other German students of mythology see in the conflagration an allusion to the final end and doom of the kingdom of the gods. It is pointed out that the ladybird was Freya's messenger, whose business it was to call the unborn from their tranquil sojourn amongst celestial flowers, into the storms of human existence. There is an airy May chafer song in Alsace—Teutonic in tradition, though French in tongue:
Avril, tu t'en vas,