hristian
teaching influenced him for the better; yet such a hold had the
tradition of his ancestors over him that the custom still survives, and
yearly on Good Friday before sunrise he enters his garden, and there on
his knees says--

"I pray, O green tree, that God may make thee good."

The old form ran thus--

"I pray thee, O green tree, that thou yield abundantly."

In some districts the lash of the Bohemian peasant's whip is well
applied to the bark of the tree, reminding one of the terse verse--

"A woman, a spaniel, and walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they be."

There is also something akin, in this Bohemian's former sentiment, to
the wish our nursery children make while eating apples. Coming to the
cores they take out the pippins and throw them over the left shoulder,
exclaiming--

"Pippin, pippin, fly away;
Bring me an apple another day."

Surely a tree hidden within its fruit.

In the German fairy tale of Ashputtel, also known as the golden
slipper--a similar legend is extant amongst the Welsh people--and from
which our modern tale of Cinderella and her glass slipper came, a tree
figured as the mysterious power. After suffering many disappointments
Ashputtel, so the legend relates, goes to a hazel tree and complains
that she has no clothes in which to go to the great feast of the king.

"Shake, shake, hazel tree,
Gold and silver over me,"

she exclaims, and her friends the birds weave garments for her while the
tree makes her resplendent with jewels of gold and silver.

"Children's sport, popular sayings, absurd customs, may be practically
unimportant, but they are not philosophically insignificant, bearing as
they do on primitive culture."[E] Trans-Alpine Europe was a greater
mystery to the nations on the littoral of the Mediterranean at the time
of Christ's appearance in Syria than any spot in Central Africa is to us
to-day.

Across the Northern mountain chains were regions unaffected by Greek or
Roman culture, and the only light shed on the memorials of Northern
Europe's early youth comes from the contributory and dimly illuminative
rays of folk-lore.

THE BABY'S RATTLE

at this juncture is worth according a passing notice, though degenerated
into the bauble it now is.

Among the Siberian, Brazilian, and Redskin tribes it was held as a
sacred and mysterious weapon. This sceptre of power of the modern
nursery--the token primitive man used