Among ourselves there is no riddle-rhyme, as far as I know, which describes the egg as a cask containing beer. But in the seventeenth century the word Humpty-Dumpty was used to designate a drink which consisted of ale boiled in brandy,[48] and this conception obviously hangs together with the two kinds of beer of the foreign riddle-rhymes on the egg. [48] Murray's Dictionary: _Humpty-Dumpty_. Other riddle-rhymes current among ourselves or abroad describe the egg as a house or a castle. The following one describes it as an enigma in itself:-- As I was going o'er London Bridge I saw something under a hedge; 'Twas neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor bone, And yet in three weeks it runned alone. (1846, p. 213.) Girls in America play a game called _Humpty-Dumpty_. They sit on the ground with their skirts tightly gathered around them so as to enclose the feet. The leader begins some rhyme, all join in, and at a certain word previously agreed upon, all throw themselves backwards, keeping their skirts tightly grasped. The object is to recover the former position without letting go the skirt (N., p. 132). Possibly the game is older than the riddle-rhymes, for these rhymes describe _Humpty-Dumpty_ as sitting on a wall, or a bank, or a ledge, or as lying in a beck, which for an actual egg are impossible situations. They are intelligible on the assumption that the sport is older than the rhyme, and that the rhyme describes human beings who are personating eggs. The name Humpty-Dumpty itself is one of the large class of rhyming compounds which are formed by the varied reduplication of the same word. Perhaps they originally conveyed a definite meaning. The word Humpty-Dumpty is allied to _hump_ and to _dump_, words which express roundness and shortness. Another name of the kind is Hoddy-Doddy, which occurs in the following riddle-rhyme:-- Hoddy-Doddy with a round, black body; Three legs and a wooden hat, what is that? (1849, p. 142.) The answer is "An iron pot."[49] The word Hoddy-Doddy in the sixteenth century was directly used to express "a short and dumpy person" (1553). It was also applied to a "hen-pecked man" (1598).[50] The meaning of shortness and roundness is expressed also by the name of the foreign equivalents of Humpty-Dumpty. The German Hümpelken-Pümpelken, and probably Lille Bulle of Scandinavia convey the same idea. On the other hand, the names Wirgele-Wargele and Gigele-Gagele suggest instability. The Danish Lille Trille is allied to _lille trölle_, little troll, that is, a member of the earlier and stumpy race of men who, by a later age, were accounted dwarves. These were credited in folk-lore with sex-relations of a primitive kind, an allusion to which seems to linger in the word Hoddy-Doddy as applied to a hen-pecked man. [49] A workman in Berkshire in 1905 repeated this riddle to H. P. [50] Murray's Dictionary: _Hoddy-Doddy_.