of the Balkan States. In time of water-famine,
more particularly in Servia, the girls go through the neighbouring
villages singing a Dodolo song of--

"We go through the village,
The clouds go in the sky;
We go faster,
Faster go the clouds;
They have overtaken us,
And wetted the corn and wine."

Precisely as the hawthorn bushes were stripped of their blossoms by
Maying parties in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so
in Servia the ballet of the leaf-dressed girl, encircled by a party of
holiday-makers, proceeds through the hamlets invoking not the Fair
Flora, but the Spirit of the Waters; the central figure, the girl in
green, being besprinkled by each cottager.

The Greeks, Bulgarians, and Roumanians observe a similar ceremony, but
on the confines of Russia so intense is the belief in the superstition
of the water goblin that in times of long drought a traveller
journeying along the road has often been seized by the ruthless hands of
the villagers and ceremoniously flung into a rivulet--a sacrifice to
appease the spirit that lay in the waters. In Ireland the fairy-tale of
Fior Usga--Princess Spring-water--has a kindred meaning; she, so the
legend relates, sank down in a well with her golden pitcher, and the
flood-gates opened and swamped the parched and barren countryside near
Kinsale.

In Germany, when a person is drowned, people recollect the fancies of
childhood, and exclaim, "The River Spirit claims its yearly sacrifice."
Even the hard-reasoning Scotch, years ago, clung to the same
superstitious fancy which oftentimes prevented some of the most selfish
of their race from saving their drowning fellows. "He will do you an
injury if you save him from the water" was one of their fears. In
England, too, the north-country people speak of the River Sprite as
Jenny Greenteeth, and children dread the green, slimy-covered rocks on a
stream's bank or on the brink of a black pool. "Jenny Greenteeth will
have thee if thee goest on't river banks" is the warning of a Lancashire
mother to her child.

The Irish fisherman's belief in the Souls' Cages and the Merrow, or Man
of the Sea, was once held in general esteem by the men who earned a
livelihood on the shores of the Atlantic. This Merrow, or Spirit of the
Waters, sometimes took upon himself a half-human form, and many a sailor
on the rocky coast of Western Ireland has told the tale of how he saw
the Merrow basking in the sun, w