The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 24

Mrs. Bramhall tells us how in j.a.pan the little children, playing about the temples, feed the pet fishes of the priests in the temple-lake. At the temple of the Mikado, at Kioto, she saw "six or eight little boys and girls ... lying at full length on the bank of the pretty lake." The fishes were called up by whistling, and the children fed them by holding over the water their open hands full of crumbs (189. 65). Other inhabitants of the sea and the waters of the earth are brought into early relation with children.

_Crabs and Crawfishes._

Among the Yeddavanad, of the Congo, a mother tells her children concerning three kinds of crabs: "Eat _kallali,_ and you will become a clever man; eat _hullali,_ and you will become as brave as a tiger; eat _mandalli,_ and you will become master of the house"

(449. 297).

In the Chippeway tale of the "Racc.o.o.n and the Crawfish," after the former, by pretending to be dead, has first attracted to him and then eaten all the crawfish, we are told:--

"While he was engaged with the broken limbs, a little female crawfish, carrying her infant sister on her back, came up seeking her relations.

Finding they had all been devoured by the racc.o.o.n, she resolved not to survive the destruction of her kindred, but went boldly up to the enemy, and said: 'Here, Aissibun (Racc.o.o.n), you behold me and my little sister.

We are all alone. You have eaten up our parents and all our friends. Eat us, too!' And she continued to say: 'Eat us, too! _Aissibun amoon, Aissibun amoon!'_ The racc.o.o.n was ashamed. 'No!' said he,' I have banqueted on the largest and fattest; I will not dishonour myself with such little prey.' At this moment, Manabozbo [the culture-hero or demi-G.o.d of these Indians] happened to pa.s.s by. _'Tyau,'_ said he to the racc.o.o.n, 'thou art a thief and an unmerciful dog. Get thee up into trees, lest I change thee into one of these same worm-fish; for thou wast thyself a sh.e.l.l-fish originally, and I transformed thee.'

Manabozho then took up the little supplicant crawfish and her infant sister, and cast them into the stream. 'There,' said he, 'you may dwell.

Hide yourselves under the stones; and hereafter you shall be playthings for little children'" (440. 411, 412).

_Games._

The imitation of animals, their movements, habits, and peculiarities in games and dances, also makes the child acquainted at an early age with these creatures.

In the section on "Bird and Beast," appropriately headed by the words of the good St. Francis of a.s.sisi--"My brother, the hare, ... my sisters, the doves,"--Mr. Newell notices some of the children's games in which the actions, cries, etc., of animals are imitated. Such are "My Household," "Frog-Pond," "b.l.o.o.d.y Tom," "Blue-birds and Yellow-birds,"

"Ducks fly" (313. 115).

_Doves._

Not at Dodona and in Arcadia alone has the dove been a.s.sociated with religion, its oracles, its mysteries, and its symbolism. In the childhood of the world, according to the great Hebrew cosmologist, "the Spirit of G.o.d moved upon the face of the waters," and a later bard and seer of our own race reanimated the ancient figure of his predecessor in all its pristine strength, when in, the story of Paradise lost and found again, he told how, at the beginning, the creative spirit

"Dove-like sat brooding o'er the vast abyss."

In the childhood of the race, it was a dove that bore to the few survivors of the great flood the branch of olive, token that the anger of Jahveh was abated, and that the waters no longer covered the whole earth. In the childhood of Christianity, when its founder was baptized of John in the river Jordan, "Lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and the Spirit of G.o.d descended like a dove, and lighted on Him,"--and the "Heavenly Dove" Still beautifies the imagery of oratory and song, the art and symbolism of the great churches, its inheritors. In the childhood of man the individual, the dove has also found warm welcome.

At the moment of the birth of St. Austrebertha (630-704 A.D.), as the quaint legend tells, "the chamber was filled with a heavenly odour, and a white dove, which hovered awhile above the house, flew into the chamber and settled on the head of the infant," and when Catherine of Racconigi (1486-1547 A.D.) was only five years old "a dove, white as snow, flew into her chamber and lighted on her shoulder"; strange to relate, however, the infant first took the bird for a tool of Satan, not a messenger of G.o.d. When St. Briocus of Cardigan, a Welsh saint of the sixth century, "was receiving the communion for the first time, a dove, white as snow, settled on his head, and the abbot knew that the young boy was a chosen vessel of honour" (191. 107, 108).

In a Swedish mother's hymn occurs the following beautiful thought:--

"There sitteth a dove so white and fair, All on the lily spray, And she listeneth how to Jesus Christ The little children pray.

"Lightly she spreads her friendly wings, And to Heaven's gate hath sped, And unto the Father in Heaven she bears The prayers which the children have said.

"And back she comes from Heaven's gate, And brings, that dove so mild, From the Father in Heaven, who hears her speak, A blessing on every child.

"Then, children, lift up a pious prayer!

It hears whatever you say; That heavenly dove so white and fair, All on the lily spray" (379. 255).

The bird-messenger of childhood finds its a.n.a.logue in the beliefs of some primitive tribes that certain birds have access to the spirit-land, and are the bearers of tidings from the departed. Into the same category fall the ancient practice of releasing a dove (or some other winged creature) at the moment of death of a human being, as a means of transport of his soul to the Elysian fields, and the belief that the soul itself took its flight in the form and semblance of a dove (509.

257).

The Haida Indians, of British Columbia, think that, "in the land of light, children often transform themselves into bears, seals, and birds," and wonderful tales are told of their adventures.

Hartley Coleridge found for the guardian angel of infancy, no apter figure than that of the dove:--

"Sweet infant, whom thy brooding parents love For what thou art, and what they hope to see thee, Unhallow'd sprites, and earth-born phantoms flee thee; Thy soft simplicity, a hovering dove, That still keeps watch from blight and bane to free thee, With its weak wings, in peaceful care outspread, Fanning invisibly thy pillow'd head, Strikes evil powers with reverential dread, Beyond the sulphurous bolts of fabled Jove, Or whatsoe'er of amulet or charm Fond ignorance devised to save poor souls from harm."

Perhaps the sweetest touch of childhood in all Latin literature is that charming pa.s.sage in Horace (_Carm._ Lib. III. 4):--

"Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, Nutrices extra limen Apuliae, Ludo fatigatoque somno Fronde nova puerum palumbes Texere,"

which Milman thus translates:--

"The vagrant infant on Mount Vultur's side, Beyond my childhood's nurse, Apulia's bounds, By play fatigued and sleep, Did the poetic doves With young leaves cover."

The amativeness of the dove has lent much to the figurative language of that second golden age, that other Eden where love is over all.

Shenstone, in his beautiful pastoral, says:--

"I have found out a gift for my fair; I have found where the wood-pigeons breed,"

and the "love of the turtle," "billing and cooing," are now transferred to human affection. Venus, the G.o.ddess of love, and the boy-G.o.d Cupid ride in a chariot drawn by doves, which birds were sacred to the sea-born child of Ura.n.u.s. In the springtime, when "the voice of the turtle is heard in the land," then "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." If, from the sacred oaks of Dodona, to the first Greeks, the doves disclosed the oracles of Jove, so has "the moan of doves in immemorial elms" divulged to generation after generation of lovers the mission of his son of the bow and quiver.

_Robin._

What the wood-pigeon was to Horace, the robin-redbreast has been to the children of old England. In the celebrated ballad of the "Children in the Wood", we are told that, after their murder by the cruel uncle,--

"No burial these pretty babes Of any man receives, Till Robin Redbreast piously Did cover them with leaves."

The poet Thomson speaks of "the redbreast sacred to the household G.o.ds,"

and Gray, in a stanza which, since the edition of 1753, has been omitted from the _Elegy_, wrote:--

"There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are frequent violets found; The robin loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground."

Dr. Robert Fletcher (447) has shown to what extent the redbreast figures in early English poetry, and the belief in his pious care for the dead and for children is found in Germany, Brittany, and other parts of the continent of Europe. In England the robin is the children's favourite bird, and rhymes and stories in his honour abound,--most famous is the nursery song, "Who killed c.o.c.k Robin?"

A sweet legend of the Greek Church tells us that "Our Lord used to feed the robins round his mother's door, when a boy; moreover, that the robin never left the sepulchre till the Resurrection, and, at the Ascension, joined in the angels' song." The popular imagination, before which the robin appears as "the pious bird with the scarlet breast," found no difficulty in a.s.signing a cause for the colour of its plumage. One legend, current amongst Catholic peoples, has it that "the robin was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptized infants in h.e.l.l, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames." In his poem _The Robin_, Whittier has versified the story from a Welsh source. An old Welsh lady thus reproves her grandson, who had tossed a stone at the robin hopping about in the apple-tree:--