first stabbed “like a sheep,” and then hung, as a sheep was, on a gallows-tree or transverse piece of wood. This suspension was identical with crucifixion on a Tau-cross, or _crux commissa_. Amongst the versions of the ballad given by Prof. Child is a fragment, numbered L, which was supplied to him by the late Canon Venables, Precentor of Lincoln, and which came from Buckinghamshire. It was told to Canon Venables about the year 1825. On this, Prof. Child remarks, in a note, that “the singer tagged on to this fragment version C of the Maid freed from the Gallows given at II., 352.” The portion of the story which Prof. Child calls “the Maid freed from the Gallows” can hardly have been “tagged on.” It is found in Derbyshire and Buckinghamshire, and the metre of both portions is the same. And the lost ball occurs in both. It remains to show for what reason the child was sacrificed. Ten of the versions published by Prof. Child begin by mentioning the falling rain—a thing which at first sight appears to have nothing to do with the matter. Thus in the Shropshire version we have:— “It rains, it rains, in Merry-Cock land, It hails, it rains both great and small.”[106] [106] Child, _ut supra_, referring to Miss Burne’s _Shropshire Folk-lore_, p. 539. And in the copy taken by Prof. Child from Brydges’s _Restituta_, we have:— “It rains, it rains in merry Scotland, It rains both great and small.” The Derbyshire version, as we have seen, begins by saying that the rain is falling “both thick and small.” Now it is remarkable that seven of the versions given by Prof. Child refer to the victim’s blood, as it flowed from the wound, as being both thick and thin. Thus in the version taken from Percy’s _Reliques_, we have:— “And out and cam the thick, thick bluid, And out and cam the thin.” Obviously the falling rain, which seems at first sight to enter so needlessly into numerous versions of the story, would have a great deal to do with the matter if the shedding of the child’s blood were intended to be an act of imitative magic simulating, and hence producing, rain. In Central Australia men are bled with a sharp flint, and “the blood is thought to represent rain.” And “in Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground.”[107] [107] Frazer’s _Golden Bough_, i., pp. 86, 88, and the authorities there cited. We know from other traditions that children were sacrificed, if not in Great Britain, at least elsewhere, with the intention of once more filling the dry beds of rivers. The Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) has recorded these lines about the English river Dun, or Don:— “The shelving, slimy, river Dun, Each year a daughter or a son.”[108] [108] Hunter’s MSS. in the British Museum.