ters, endeavouring to catch them, which they use strenuous efforts to avoid.
(v.)—The following version, called “May I go out to play?” is very similar to the last and is played in much the same way.
The Daughter says: “Please may I go out to play?”
Mother: “How long will you stay?”
D.: “Three hours in a day.”
M.: “Will you come when I call you?”
D.: “No.”
M.: “Will you come when I fetch you?”
D.: “Yes.”
M.: “Make then your curtsies and be off.”
The girls then scamper off as before, and as they run about the field keep calling out, “I won’t go home till seven o’clock,” “I won’t go home till seven o’clock.” After they have been running about for some five or ten minutes the mother calls Alice (or whatever the name may be) to come home, when the one addressed will run all the faster, crying louder than before, “I won’t go home till seven o’clock.” Then the mother commences to chase them until she catches them, and when she gets them to any particular place in the field where the others are playing, she says:
“Where have you been?”
D. “Up to Grandmother’s.”
M. “What have you done that you have been away so long?”
D. “I have cleaned the grate and dusted the room,”
M. “What did she give you?”
D. “A piece of bread and cheese so big as a house, and a piece of plum cake so big as a mouse?”
M. “Where’s my share?”
D. “Up in higher cupboard.”
M. “It’s not there.”
D. “Up in lower cupboard.”[1]
- ↑ Conf. similar lines in my paper on “Christmas Mummers in Dorsetshire” in Folklore Record, vol. iii. p. 109.
