Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

786 SUMMER AND WINTER.
hours (conf. p. 590 n.), and the penalty attached to it, of acting
the butze and being ducked, 1 look upon as mere accessories,
kept alive long after the substance of the festival had perished
(see Suppl.).
Kuhn (pp. 314-29) has lately furnished us with accurate ac
counts of Whitsun customs in the Marks. In the Mittelmark
the houses are decorated with mai/ in the Altrnark the farmservants,
horse-keepers and ox-boys go round the farms, and
carry May-crowns made of flowers and birch twigs to the farmers,
who used to hang them up on their houses, and leave them hang
ing till the next year. On Whitsun morning the cows and horses
are driven for the first time to the fallow pasture, and it is a great
thing to be the first there. The animal that arrives first has a
bunch of mai 3
tied to its tail, which bunch is called dau-sleipe
(dew-sweep), 1 while the last comer is dressed up in fir-twigs,
all sorts of green stuff and field flowers, and called the motley
cow or motley horse, and the boy belonging to it the pingst-kddm
or pingst-kddrel. At Havelberg the cow that came home first
at night used to be adorned with the crown of flowers, and the
last got the t/tau-schleife ; now this latter practice is alone kept
up. 2
In some of the Altmark villages, the lad whose horse gets
to the pasture first is named thau-schlepper, and he who drives
the hindmost is made motley boy, viz. they clothe him from head
to foot in wild flowers, and at noon lead him from farm to farm,
the dew-sweeper pronouncing the rhymes. In other places a pole
decked with flowers and ribbons is carried round, and called the
bammel (dangle) or pings -kddm, though, as a rule, this last name
is reserved for the boy shrouded in leaves and flowers, who
accompanies. He is sometimes led by two others called hunde-
brosel. In some parts of the Mittelmark the muffled boy is called
the kaudernest. On the Dromling the boys go round with the
pingst-kddm, and the girls with the may-bride, collecting gifts.
Some villages south of the Dromling have a more elaborate
1 So named, because it has to touch the dewy grass: which confirms my
interpretation of the Alamannic tau-dragil (E.A. 94, 630), supra p. 387 note.
a In some places a winning horse has a stick cleft in three fixed on his head
and richly encircled with the finest flowers ; the boy who rides him, beside many
garlands, receives a cap woven of rushes, and must preserve a serious countenance
while the procession slowly advances : if he can be provoked to laughter, he loses,
KuLn, p. 328.