NOTES, QUERIES, NOTICES, AND NEWS.
Scotch Riddle.—This has not, so far as I know, been yet recorded. It is from the Buchan district of Aberdeenshire. The answer is a cow being milked.
"Pink! Pank!
Yn anëth the bank,
Ten upo' four."
Children's Rhyme, "The Devil's dead."—(See p. 196.) I find that this was known to Charles Lamb. In his "Letters," vol. i. p. 167 (1837), he says of "Shakespeare's Muse," "I thought she had been dead, and buried in Stratford Church, with the young man that kept her company:—
'But it seems like the devil,
Buried in Cole Harbour,
Some say she's risen again,
Gone 'prentice to a barber.'"
S. Swithin and Rainmakers.—The article on this subject in last month's issue contains no allusion to S. Médard, who holds this function over Belgium, and the greater part of France. All the departments under the influence of the mistral suffer terribly from want of rain. I have been at many places in the Ardèche, Gard, Drôme, Rhîne, Bouches du Rhone, Var, where the people have declared that it had not rained comme il faut for 20 years, nevertheless they have a quaint version of our " ed sky in the morning," &c.
"Quand le ciel est rouge le matin,
C'est signe qu'il va mouiller son prochain."
In the departments bordering the Swiss Alps, the variableness of the climate is testified by the proverb:
"Quand il fait beau, prends ton manteau,
Quand il pleut prends ce que tu veux."
S. Médard is the 9th June, and when he rains the idea also obtains that S. Barnabas (11th June) can keep him in check, an idea which
