a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and doggerel that echoes nothing.
A soule-cake, a soule-cake,
was the refrain which Aubrey heard; but in modern Cheshire it is—
A soul! A soul! A soul-cake!
Please good Missis, a soul-cake![[751]]
printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—
Palm’n, Palm’n, Påsken,
Låt’t den Kukkuk kråsken,
Låt’t dei Viögel singen,
Låt’t den Kukkuk springen![[752]]