“It rains, it rains, in Merry-Cock land,
It hails, it rains both great and small.”[106]
And in the copy taken by Prof. Child from Brydges’s Restituta, we have:—
“It rains, it rains in merry Scotland,
It rains both great and small.”
The Derbyshire version, as we have seen, begins by saying that the rain is falling “both thick and small.”
Now it is remarkable that seven of the versions given by Prof. Child refer to the victim’s blood, as it flowed from the wound, as being both thick and thin. Thus in the version taken from Percy’s Reliques, we have:—
“And out and cam the thick, thick bluid,
And out and cam the thin.”
Obviously the falling rain, which seems at first sight to enter so needlessly into numerous versions of the story, would have a great deal to do with the matter if the shedding of the child’s blood were intended to be an act of imitative magic simulating, and hence producing, rain. In Central Australia men are bled with a sharp flint, and “the blood is thought to represent rain.” And “in Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground.”[107]