"Where shall we bury her?
Under the apple-tree."
After the ceremonies of burial have been completed, the ghost of Miss Jennia Jones suddenly arises—
"I dreamt I saw a ghost last night,
Ghost last night, ghost last night—
I dreamt I saw a ghost last night,
Under the apple-tree!"
The ring breaks up, and flies with shrieks, and the one caught is to represent Miss Jennia Jones.
An interesting feature of our game is the symbolism of color. "Each of these colors," says an informant, "which denoted a profession, also typified a feeling. Thus, blue, which is said to be for sailors, suggested constancy."
In one version of the game, which comes to us from an Irish source, green is for grief, red for joy, black for mourning, and white for death. In another such version, white is for angels, and is the chosen color; a reading we would willingly adopt, as probably more ancient, and as expressing the original seriousness of the whole, and the feeling which the color of white symbolized. In more common Irish phrase, green is for Irish, yellow for Orangemen. In Cincinnati, purple is for kings and queens, gray for Quakers. In a Connecticut variation, yellow is for glad folks.
An English saying corresponds closely to the significance of colors in our game:
Blue is true, yellow is jealous,
Green is forsaken, red is brazen,
White is love, and black is death.
A variation from West Virginia makes the question apply to the dress of the mourners, not of the deceased: "What shall we dress in?" "In our red, in our blue," etc., are rejected, and the decision is, "In our white."
Such imitations of burial ceremonies are not merely imaginative. It was once the custom for the girls of a village to take an active part in the interment of one of their number. In a Flemish town, a generation since, when a young girl died, her body was carried to the church, thence to the cemetery, by her former companions. "The religious ceremony over, and the coffin deposited in the earth, all the young girls, holding in one hand the mortuary cloth, returned to the church, chanting the maiden's dance with a spirit and rhythm scarcely conceivable by one who has not heard it. The pall which they carried to the church was of sky-blue silk, having in the middle a great cross of white silk, on which were set three crowns of silver."