Sunday and dress one of their playmates with shoots and sprigs he was covered so thoroughly as to be rendered

FIGS. 159 to 163.-Channel Islands. From Akerman.

FIGS. 164 to 167.-British. From Akerman.

blind, whereupon two of his companions, taking him by the hand lest he should stumble, led him dancing and singing from home to home. Amor, like Homer, was reputed blind,

and the what-nots on Fig. 167 may possibly be leaves, the symbols of the living, loving Elf, or Life-" this seniorjunior, giant-dwarf Dan Cupid ".

It was practically a universal pagan custom to celebrate the return of Spring by carrying away and destroying a rude idol of the old Dad or Death:

Now carry we Death out of the village,
The new Summer into the village,
Welcome, dear Summer,

Green little corn.

FIG. 168.-From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.). In other parts of Bohemia-and the curious reader will find several Bohemias on the Ordnance maps of England -the song varies; it is not Summer that comes back but Life :

We have carried away Death,

And brought back Life.'

At the feast of the Ascension in Transylvania, the image of Death is clothed gaudily in the dress of a girl having wound throughout the village supported by two girls the image is stripped of its finery and flung into the river; the dress, however, is assumed by one of the girls and the procession returns singing a hymn. "Thus," says Miss Harrison, "it is clear that the girl is a sort of resuscitated Death." In other words, like the May Queen she symbolised the Virgin or Fairy Queen-Vera or Una, the Spirit, Sprout, or Spirit of the Universe, the Fair Ovary of Everything who is represented on the summit of the Christmas Tree: in Latin virgo means not only a virgin but also a sprig or sprout.

1 Ancient Art and Ritual, pp. 70 and 71.

CHAPTER VII

OBERON

O queen, whom Jove hath willed
To found this new-born city, here to reign,
And stubborn tribes with justice to refrain,
We, Troy's poor fugitives, implore thy grace,
Storm-tost and wandering over every main,-
Forbid the flames our vessels to deface,
Mark our afflicted plight, and spare a pious race.

"We come not hither with the sword to rend
Your Libyan homes, and shoreward drive the prey.
Nay, no such violence our thoughts intend."
-VIRGIL, Eneid, I., lxix., 57.

THE old Welsh poets commemorate what they term Three National Pillars of the Island of Britain, to wit: "First -Hu, the vast of size, first brought the nation of the Cymry to the Isle of Britain; and from the summer land called Deffrobani they came (namely, the place where Constantinople now is), and through Mor Tawch, the placid or pacific sea, they came up to the Isle of Britain and Armorica, where they remained. Second-Prydain, son of Aedd the Great, first erected a government and a kingdom over Ynys Prydain, and previous to that time there was but little gentleness and ordinance, save a superiority of oppression. Third-Dyfnwal Moelmud-and he was the first that made a discrimination of mutual rights and statute law, and customs, and privileges of land and nation,

and on account of these things were they called the three pillars of the Cymry." 1

The Kymbri of Cambria claim themselves to be of the same race as the Kimmeroi, from whom the Crimea takes its name, also that Cumberland is likewise a land of the Cumbers. The authorities now usually explain the term Kymbri as meaning fellow countrymen, and when occurring in place-names such as Kemper, Quimper, Comber, Kember, Cymner, etc., it is invariably expounded to mean confluence the word would thus seem to have had imposed upon it precisely the same meaning as synagogue, i.e., a coming together or congregation, and it remains to inquire why this was so.

The Kymbri were also known as Cynbro, and the interchangeability of kym and kin is seemingly universal: the Khan of Tartary was synonymously the Cham of Tartary; our Cambridge is still academically Cantabrigia, a compact is a contract, and the identity between cum and con might be demonstrated by innumerable instances. This being so, it is highly likely that the Kymbri were followers of King Bri, otherwise King Aubrey, of the Iberii or Iberian race. In Celtic aber or ebyr-as at Aberdeen, Aberystwith, etc.-meant a place of confluence of streams, burns, or brooks; and aber seems thus to have been synonymous with camber.

Ireland, or Ibernia, as it figures in old maps, now Hibernia, traces its title to a certain Heber, and until the time of Henry VII., when the custom was prohibited, the Hibernians used to rush into battle with perfervid cries of Aber ! 2 It is a recognised peculiarity of the Gaelic language to 1 Cƒ. Thomas, J. J., Brit. Antiquissima, p. 29.

2 Hone, W., Everyday Book, i., 502.