en, for thus sings he--
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! cuckoo!
O word of fear,
Unpleasing to the married ear!"

Thus is cuckoo gossip perpetuated in rhyme and song; but an old belief
in the mysteriously disappearing bird gave an opportunity to children to
await its return in the early summer, and then address to it all kinds
of ridiculous questions.

"How many years have I to live?" is a favourite query. The other like
that of the Lithuanian maid, "Shall I soon be married?" meets with
favour amongst single girls.

A German song, entitled "The Shepherd Maiden," indicates this custom.
The words being--

"A shepherd maiden, one fine day,
Two lambs to pasture led,
To verdant fields where daisies grew,
And bloomed the clover red;
There spied she in a hedge close by
A cuckoo, call with merry cry,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"

After chasing the immortal bird from tree to tree to have her question,
"Shall I soon be married?" answered, the song concludes with this
taunting refrain--

"Two hundred then she counted o'er,
The cuckoo still cried as before,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"

In our earliest published song, words and music composed by John of
Forsete, monk of Reading Abbey, date 1225, and entitled "Sumer is icumen
in," the cuckoo is also extolled--

"Summer is a-coming in, loudly sing, cuckoo;
Groweth the seed, bloweth the mead, and springeth wood anew.
Sing, cuckoo! Merry sing, cuckoo,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"

The peasantry of Russia, India, and Germany contribute to the collection
of cuckoo-lore. Grimm mentions a Cuckoo Hill in Gauchsberg. The cuckoo
and not the hill may have had the mystic sense.

Identical with this Cuckoo Hill, in its solemn significance, there
occurs a passage in the game of Hot Cockles, played formerly at
Yorkshire funerals.

"Where is the poor man to go?"

the friends whine, and the mutes who are in readiness to follow the
coffin beat their knees with open hands and reply--

"Over the Cuckoo Hill, I oh!"

The association of ideas about the prophetic notes of the cuckoo's
mocking voice--in matters of marriage and death--are pretty general, and
there are still further many points of identity in the tales told by
the children of India and Southern Russia. Like the Ph[oe]nix idea
amongst the people of Egypt, Persia, and India, these traditions
allegorise the soul