Chevy Chase is a good old-fashioned game of courage and adventure. Does any one play it now? No child can play it con amore who does not know who it was who
When his legs were smitten off
He fought upon his stumps,
and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in the cup of defeat was "Earl Percy sees my face——"
All wreathed with romance are the song-games, "Nuts in May," "There came Three Knights," and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing movement and the song of marriage-by-capture ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe to the vanquished! This is a very old game—and there are many words to it. One set I know, but I never have known the end. Little boys in light trousers and short jackets and little girls in narrow frilled gowns used to play it on the village green a hundred years ago. This is how it began:
Up and down the green grass
This and that and thus,
Come along, my pretty maid,
And take a walk with us;
You shall have a duck, my dear,
And you shall have a drake,
And you shall have a handsome man,
For your father's sake.
My mother told me all of that song-game, and that is all of it that I can remember. She always said she would write it down, and I always thought there was plenty of time, and somehow there was not, and so I do not know the end. Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out the Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody Else now so mysteriously gets all the credit, may know the end of these verses. If he does, and if he sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.
This game of come and go and give and take is alive in France; witness the old song:
Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,
Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard
Toujours si gai?
Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi,
Compagnons de la Marjolaine.
Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi
Toujours si gais.
Et que veulent ces cavaliers,
Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
Et que veulent ces cavaliers
Toujours si gais?
Des jeunes filles à marier,
Compagnons de la Marjolaine;
Des jeunes filles à marier,
Toujours si gais.
And I have no doubt that stout Dutch children and German children with flaxen plaits, and small contadine, and Spanish and Swedish and Russian and Lithuanian babes all move rhythmically back and forth on their native greensward and rehearse the old story of the fair maid and the Knight "out to marry."
The Mulberry Bush is another of the old song-games, where play-acting is the soul of the adventure, and this too is everywhere. "A la claire fontaine," I remember as the French version, danced on wet days in the cloisters of the convent of my youth. Le Pont d'Avignon, a glorious game, with its impersonations of animals, has, as far as I know, no counterpart in this country.