be kind and very good,’ apply to the happy swain.” This interesting note not only suggests, as Mr. Baker and Mr. Sweeting say, the antiquity of the game and its connection with harvest at a time when the farms were all laid in open fields, but it points further to the custom of courtship and marriage being the outcome of village festivals and dances held after spring sowing and harvest gatherings. It seems in Northamptonshire not to have quite reached the stage of the pure children’s game before it was taken note of by Mr. Baker, and this is an important illustration of the descent of children’s games from customs. As soon as it has become a child’s game, however, the process of decadence sets in. Thus, besides verbal alterations, the lines relating to farming have dropped out of the Wakefield version. It is abundantly clear from the more perfect game-rhymes that the waiting for a partner is an episode in the harvest customs, as if, when the outdoor business of the season was finished, the domestic element becomes the next important transaction in the year’s proceedings. The curious four-lined formula applicable to the duties of married life may indeed be a relic of those rhythmical formulæ which are found throughout all early legal ceremonies. A reference to Mr. Ralston’s section on marriage songs, in his _Songs of the Russian People_, makes it clear that marriages in Russia were contracted at the gatherings called Besyedas (p. 264), which were social gatherings held during October after the completion of the harvest; and the practice is, of course, not confined to Russia. It is also probable that this game may have preserved the tradition of a formula sung at the sowing of grain, in order to propitiate the earth goddess to promote and quicken the growth of the crops. Turning around or bowing to fields and lands and pantomimic actions in imitation of those actually required, are very general in the history of sympathetic magic among primitive peoples, as reference to Mr. Frazer’s _Golden Bough_ will prove; and taking the rhyming formula together with the imitative action, I am inclined to believe that in this game we may have the last relics of a very ancient agricultural rite. Obadiah