Avril, tu t’en vas! Car Mai vient la-bas Pour balayer ta figure De pluie, aussi de froidure. Hanneton, vole! Hanneton, vole! Au firmament bleu, Ton nid est en feu, Les Turcs avec leur èpée Viennent tuer ta couvée. Hanneton, vole! Hanneton, vole! or: April, away! For here cometh May With sunshine again To banish the rain. May-beetle, fly! May-beetle, fly! Afar in the sky, With flames leaping high, The Turks with swords rude Have slaughtered your brood. May-beetle, fly! May-beetle, fly! The first comic opera, a _pastourale_ six hundred years old, _Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion_ by Adam de la Hale, is full of May songs. The King and Queen of the May and May Pole dancers and the English Jack-in-the-Green, the Thuringian Little Leaf Man and the Russian tree dressed up are only a few of the many examples of the rites of spring. And we have seen how the Druids and the Aztecs celebrated spring. One of the most modern composers, Igor Stravinsky, has written a ballet called _Le Sacre du Printemps_ (Rites of Spring) in which he has used the ancient Russian pagan rites of celebrating the spring. The music is wild and the rhythms primitive. RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES From legends, we know that songs and dances of the Polish people accompanied their religious ceremonies before Christianity. When they exchanged their pagan gods for the teachings of the early Christian fathers, many of these songs were lost, but some of them were handed down merely by changing the pagan name to the Christian. These songs have been traced by the fact that many of them are based on the old pentatonic scale. The Slavs, the Lithuanians and the Germanic races have kept this scale in Eastern and Middle Europe, and the Greeks, the ancient Italians and the Celts brought it into Western and Southern Europe. These scales are supposed to have come from Indo-China, for it must not be forgotten that the Polish along with all Slavs migrated from Asia, the cradle of the human race. Two festivals,—St. John’s Eve and Christmas, came down from the pagan era in Poland and the manner of celebration has changed little throughout the centuries. CHRISTMAS CAROLS