a stave through his body, having committed suicide. It is not always good to investigate the past too closely.
"Jenny Jones" in America becomes Miss Jennia Jones, "Jennia" being understood to be a contraction of "Virginia"! Mr. Newell thinks that Jones was originally Jo (joy, "joie"), an old English word for sweetheart. He is further of the opinion that the song was in the first place a love-tale of the kind of the well-known Venetian Rosetina. Taking this view, there is another southern love-ballad which seems to have a sort of affinity with "Jenny," the "Bela Sabè" or "Belle Isabelle" of the Mediterranean coast. It will be remembered that the symbolical sense of different colours plays a chief part in all versions of "Jenny Jones"; one colour after another is proposed but rejected as unsuitable; at last black is accepted in the English text and white in the American— white being "for death" or "for angels." Subjoined is a literal transcript of "Bela Sabe":
"O Sabè, bela Sabè,
To my wedding come I pray!"
"At your wedding I'll not be
But the dance I mean to see."
"If the dance you join to-night,
Come attired all in white."
In a robe of charming hue
The bela soon is drest;
And if 'tis good the blue,
For Hope the green is best.
At the first note of the tambour,
The bela joins the ball;
At the next note of the tambour,
In death they see her fall.
"O Sabè, bela Sabè,
Do you die by force, ah, say? "
"It is not by force I go.
Love of you has laid me low."
"If for my true love you die
So for your true love will I."
Then out his knife he drew,
And his heart he ran it through.
Playing at death and at mourning is a very old game, perhaps one of the oldest of all. I have no doubt that the little children of Judæa played at something like "Jenny Jones," and that to this refers the
