Again, in the game as played abroad the child that is chosen is put to the test if it can be made to laugh (Nos. 2, 4, 5, 8). In the game of Little Dog also, the child that laughs passes into the keeping of a new owner. Laughing indicates quickening into life, and in folk-lore generally the child that refrains from laughing is reckoned uncanny. Numerous stories are told of the changeling that was made to laugh and disappeared, when the real child was found restored to its cradle.
Again, in the foreign game the player who seeks to secure a child speaks of herself as lame, and limps in order to prove herself so (Nos. 1, 2, 14). In one instance she attributes her limping to a bone in her leg. Limping, in the estimation of Mannhardt, is peculiar to the woman who has borne children (M., p. 305). For in German popular parlance the woman who is confined, is said to have been bitten by the stork who brought the child.
A reminiscence of this idea lurks in our proverb rhyme:—
The wife who expects to have a good name,
Is always at home as if she were lame;
And the maid that is honest, her chiefest delight
Is still to be doing from morning till night.[41]
Again, in one version of the foreign game the children that are won over are given the names of dogs, and when their former owner attempts to get them back, they rush at her and bark (No. 1). This corresponds to our game of Little Dog, in which the child that stands apart is addressed as "Little Dog I call you." Grimm declared himself at a loss to account for the fact that a dog was associated with the Norns or Fate-maidens who assisted at childbirth (Gr., p. 339); Mannhardt cites the belief that the spirits of the dead were sometimes spoken of as dogs (M., p. 301); and in England there also exists a superstition that the winds that rush past at night are dogs, the so-called Gabriel hounds or ratchets (cf. below, p. 165).
Features preserved in other games contain similar suggestions which are worth noting.
Thus in the game known as Drop-handkerchief one girl holding a kerchief goes round the others who are arranged in a circle, saying:—
I have a little dog and it won't bite you
It won't bite you, it won't bite you [ad lib.]
It will bite you.
(1894, I, 109.)
The person on whom the little dog is bestowed is "bitten"; that is, she is in the same predicament as the German woman who is bitten by the stork, and the limping woman of the German Babyland game.
In playing Drop-handkerchief in Deptford the children sing:—