LITHUANIA, LATVIA 293

woman. Courtship is the one happy moment; for marriage drags
her away to a strange land and folk, and her life becomes an un-
ending burden. But the maid is happy and expectant. She sports
her wreath of rue, and makes pretty fancies revolve about it. But
it may be withered by scandal or suspicion, or lost by carelessness.
She may lose a ring also at the fountain or in a wood, and Its
recovery Is the equivalent of a proposal of marriage. The youth, for
his part, Is a ploughboy or fisherboy. He sleeps In a stable and
rides a-wooing on a brown horse. The encounter may be anywhere,
but the proposal must be In due form to the assembled family.
Then there Is bustle about the trousseau, which should have been
gathered In the years of spinsterhood, but may not yet be ready.
The old folk lose a spinner or a farm-hand, and feel the economic
strain keenly. A wagon takes away the gathered trousseau, and if
its wheels break, that is a sign of bad luck. Then on the wedding
morning the girl wakes brightly enough, but Is soon crying in her
parents' arms and lamenting her long voyage. Sometimes she has to
reproach them for sending her so far away: two hundred miles Is
as bad an estrangement as the circumference of the globe. Or she
may complain that she has been paired off with a knave. Then
there are the heavy songs of toil, aggravated by the habits of the
husband. He lolls in taverns and sings songs In praise of hops, rye,
and barley. Then there are the liquid cradle-songs, and at long
last there are dirges In measured prose. The song may be about
the song itself, which is a kind of companion always at the singer's
side:

Singing born, a-slnging grew I,

singing all my life must pass,

singing goes the soul within me

In the garden of God's sons.

(Barons 3, Endzelln i.)

8. Esthonia, Finland

In the previous chapter attention has been drawn to the common
elements of ballad technique which prevail in the two Baltic
countries of Indo-European speech and the two which speak
varieties of Finnish.J The Esthonian tongue is as intimately con-
nected with Finnish as are the dialects of a West European speech;
the ballad style, the themes, and the quasi-epic associations are

1 See Note M, p. 390.