Blue is for sailors; you can't come in blue.
May we come in white?
White is for weddings; you can't come in white.
May we come in black?
Black is for funerals, so you can come in that.
Jenny is then carried and buried (i.e., laid on the grass) by two of the girls, while the rest follow as mourners, uttering a low, prolonged wail.
Perhaps the earliest acted tragedy—a tragedy acted before Æschylus lived—was something like this. Anyhow, it may remind us of how early a taste for the tragic is developed, if not in the life of mankind at all events in the life of man. "What is the reason," asks St Augustine, "that men wish to be moved by the sight of tragic and painful things, which, nevertheless, they do not wish to undergo themselves? For the spectators (at a play) desire to feel grieved, and this grief is their joy: whence comes it unless from some strange spiritual malady?"[7]
Dr Pitrè describes this Sicilian game: A child lies down, pretending to be dead. His companions stand round and sing a dirge in the most dolorous tones. Now and then, one of them runs up to him and lifts an arm or a leg, afterwards letting it fall, to make sure that he is quite dead. Satisfied on this point, they prepare to bury him, but before doing so, they nearly stifle him with parting kisses. Tired, at last, of his painful position, the would-be dead boy jumps up and gets on the back of the most aggressive of his playmates, who is bound to carry him off the scene.
To play at funerals was probably a very ancient amusement. No doubt some such game as the above is alluded to in the text, "...children sitting in the markets and calling unto their fellows and saying, We have piped unto you and ye have not danced, we have mourned unto you and ye have not lamented."