These few examples may serve to show that what the performers themselves regard only as a simple expedient in the arranging of their games, if they ever give the matter a thought, is really a survival of the belief in the efficacy of certain magical words, turned into rhyme, to propitiate success. If this idea had not been instilled into our children by long custom and habit, it is not believed that they would continue to repeat such unmeaning drivel. Yet, as childish as it may seem, it advances us one step in solving the intricate problem in hand; for here, too, “the child is father to the man.”
[III]
WEATHER LORE
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”—Shakespeare.
There is a certain class of so-called signs, that from long use have become so embedded in the every-day life of the people as to pass current with some as mere whimsical fancies, with others as possessing a real significance. At any rate, they crop out everywhere in the course of common conversation. Most of them have been handed down from former generations, while not a few exhale the strong aroma of the native soil itself.
Of this class of familiar signs or omens, affecting only the smaller and more casual happenings one may encounter from day to day, or from hour to hour, those only will be noticed which seem based on actual superstition. Many current weather proverbs accord so exactly with the observations of science as to exclude them from any such classification. They are simply the homely records of a simple folk, drawn from long experience of nature in all her moods. As even the prophecies of the Weather Bureau itself often fail of fulfilment, it is not to be wondered at if weather proverbs sometimes prove no better guide, especially when we consider that “all signs fail in a dry time.”
The following are a few examples selected from among some hundreds:—
When a cat races playfully about the house, it is a sign that the wind will rise.