No. 40 Happy Is the Miller
New York.
An odd number of players, of whom the one not paired stands in the centre of the ring. The others march in couples, each consisting of a girl and a boy, till the sudden end of the song, when each boy grasps the girl in front of him.
Happy is the miller, who lives by himself,
All the bread and cheese he piles upon the shelf,
One hand in the hopper, and the other in the bag,
The wheel turns around, and he cries out, Grab!
Western New York.
Another version:
Happy is the miller that lives in the mill;
While the mill goes round, he works with a will;
One hand in the hopper, and one in the bag,
The mill goes around, and he cries out, Grab!
Cincinnati.
The miller, whose pay used to be taken in a proportion of corn ground, was a common object of popular satire.
In Germany the mill-wheel, as it slowly revolves, is said to exclaim—
There is—a thief—in the mill!
Then, moving more quickly—
Who is he? who is he? who is he?
And at last answers very fast, and without pausing—
The miller! the miller! the miller!
“Round and Round, the Mill Goes Round,” is mentioned as an English dance at the end of the seventeenth century. A song of “The Happy Miller” is printed in “Pills to Purge Melancholy” (1707), of which the first verse is—
How happy is the mortal that lives by his mill!
That depends on his own, not on Fortune’s wheel;
By the sleight of his hand, and the strength of his back,
How merrily his mill goes, clack, clack, clack!
This song was doubtless founded on the popular game; but the modern children’s sport has preserved the idea, if not the elegance, of the old dance better than the printed words of a hundred and seventy years since. A variation of the same game is still familiar in Canada and Sweden.81