n, with
their pole and bucket, were placed in the moon, "where they could
be seen from earth"; which phrase must refer to the lunar spots.
Thorpe, speaking of the allusion in the _Edda_ to these spots, says
that they "require but little illustration. Here they are children
carrying water in a bucket, a superstition still preserved in the
popular belief of the Swedes." [21] We are all reminded at once of
the nursery rhyme--

"Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after."

Little have we thought, when rehearsing this jingle in our juvenile
hours, that we should some day discover its roots in one of the
oldest mythologies of the world. But such is the case. Mr.
Baring-Gould has evolved the argument in a manner which, if not
absolutely conclusive in each point, is extremely cogent and clear.
"This verse, which to us seems at first sight nonsense, I have no
hesitation in saying has a high antiquity, and refers to the Eddaic
Hjuki and Bil. The names indicate as much. Hjuki, in Norse, would
be pronounced Juki, which would readily become Jack; and Bil, for
the sake of euphony and in order to give a female name to one of the
children, would become Jill. The fall of Jack, and the subsequent
fall of Jill, simply represent the vanishing of one moon spot after
another, as the moon wanes. But the old Norse myth had a deeper
signification than merely an explanation of the moon spots. Hjuki is
derived from the verb jakka, to heap or pile together, to assemble
and increase; and Bil, from bila, to break up or dissolve. Hjuki and
Bil, therefore, signify nothing more than the waxing and waning of
the moon, and the water they are represented as bearing signifies the
fact that the rainfall depends on the phases of the moon. Waxing and
waning were individualized, and the meteorological fact of the
connection of the rain with the moon was represented by the
children as water-bearers. But though Jack and Jill became by
degrees dissevered in the popular mind from the moon, the original
myth went through a fresh phase, and exists still under a new form.
The Norse superstition attributed _theft_ to the moon, and the
vulgar soon began to believe that the figure they saw in the moon
was the thief. The lunar specks certainly may be made to resemble
one figure, but only a lively imagination can discern two. The girl
soon dropped out of pop