“She is here, she is here, the swallow! Cometh another of honey’d song, She percheth, twittereth all day long, Sweet are her notes that follow.” That the same custom, no newer than the recurrence of Nature’s happiest gifts, enchanted the boys of ancient Athens we may infer from our knowledge of it in “seagirt” Rhodes. There the carol began:— “She is here, she is here, the swallow! Fair seasons bringing, fair years to follow! Her belly is white, Her back black as night! From your rich house Roll forth to us Tarts, wines and cheese: Or if not these, Oatmeal and barley cake The swallow deigns to take.”[14] When the spring was late, Aristophanes’s peevish old man was probably not the only one to say: “Zeus! is the swallow never going to come?” Nor under a punctual March sun was his sneak thief the only one to talk about the weather:— “Haunting about the butcher’s shops, the weather being mild, ‘See, boys,’ says I, ‘the swallow there! why, summer’s come,’ I say, And when they turned to gape and stare I snatched a steak away.”[15] Footnote 14: Translated by J. A. Symonds. Footnote 15: _Knights_, 570, translated by Frere. In graver poetry the dusky swallow of Simonides shared with the lovely-voiced nightingale of Sappho the honour of announcing the fragrant spring. Other seasons in Athens had their crop of mendicant carols, and the boyish custom of celebrating Apollo at one of his summer festivals by going about from house to house and singing songs of good wishes is suggested in the modern celebration of New Year’s or St. Basil’s day. It is even possible that the rough little model of a ship carried by the boys, as if to illustrate the sea-journey of the saint “come from Cæsarea,” is a late descendant of the ship that was carried in the Panathenaic procession, the origin of which lay in Theseus’s journey to Crete, and the sail of which was Athena’s own peplos.