We have one or two of the ancient Lytierses in what is most likely very nearly their original and popular form. One, composed of distiches telling the story of Midas' son, is preserved in a tragedy by Sosibius, the Syracusian poet. The following, more general in subject, I take from the tenth Idyl of Theocritus:-- Come now hearken awhile to the songs of the god Lytierses. Demeter, granter of fruits, many sheaves vouchsafe to the cornfield, Aye to be skilfully tilled, and reaped, and the harvest abundant. Fasten the heaps, ye binders of sheaves, lest any one passing, Call out, "worthless clowns, you earn no part of your wages." Let every sheaf that the sickle has cut be turned to the north wind Or to the west exposed, for so will the corn grow fatter. Ye who of wheat are threshers, beware how ye slumber at mid-day, Then is the chaff from the stalk of the wheat, most easily parted. Reapers, to labour begin, as soon as the lark upriseth, And when he sleeps, leave off, yet rest when the sun overpowers. Blest, O youths, is the life of a frog, for he never is anxious Who is to pour him his drink, for he always has plenty. Better at once, O miserly steward, to boil our lentils; Mind you don't cut your fingers in trying to chop them to atoms. These are the songs for the toilers to sing in the heat of the harvest. Most modern harvest songs manage, like that of Theocritus, to convey some hint of thirst or hunger. "Be merry, O comrades!" sing the girl reapers of Casteignano dei Greci, a Greek settlement in Terra d'Otranto, "Be merry, and go not on your way so downcast; I saw things you cannot see; I saw the housewife kneading dough, or preparing macaroni; and she does it for us to eat, so that we may work like lions at the harvest, and rejoice the heart of the husbandman." This may be a statement of fact or a suggestion of what ought to be a fact. Other songs, sung exclusively at the harvest, bear no outward sign of connection with it; and the reason of their use on that occasion is hopelessly lost. IV. I pass on to the old curiosity shop of popular traditions--the nursery. Children, with their innate conservatism, have stored a vast assemblage of odds and ends which fascinate by their very incompleteness. Religion, mythology, history, physical science, or what stood for it; the East, the North--those great banks of ideas--have been impartially drawn on by the infant folk-lorists at their nurses' knees. Children in the four quarters of the globe, repeat the same magic formulae; words which to every grown person seem devoid of sense, have a universality denied to any articles of faith. What, for example, is the meaning of the play with the snail? Why is he so persistently asked to put his horns out? Pages might be filled with the variants of the well-known invocation which has currency from Rome to Pekin. English: I. Snail, snail, put out your horn, Or I'll kill your father and mother the morn. 2.