Priests and rills

I thought I had posted about this before, but a search for rill comes up empty, so here it is again. This is an anonymous poem that was anthologized in one of the McGuffey Eclectic Readers:

Run, run, thou tiny rill;

Run, and turn the village mill;

Run, and fill the deep, clear pool

In the woodland's shade so cool,

Where the sheep love best to stray

In the sultry summer day;

Where the wild birds bathe and drink,

And the wild flowers fringe the brink.

Run, run, thou tiny rill,

Round the rocks, and down the hill;

Sing to every child like me;

The birds will join you, full of glee:

And we will listen to the song

You sing, your rippling course along.

One of my younger siblings (I don't remember which), reading this, didn't understand the key word and asked what a rill was. Whatever the answer, he or she somehow misheard it as "a clergyman." Thus this became a poem about a tiny clergyman running round the rocks and down the hill, in search of straying sheep. This singing rill also became associated with the singing clergyman played by Bing Crosby in the 1994 film Going My Way. We had never seen this movie but thought the poster was amusing. At one point, someone made a handmade Going My Way poster that advertised the film as "positively packed with clergymen!" (Clergyman is one of those inherently funny words.)

Wade has recently been suggesting that I'm going to take on some kind of priestly role. This has mostly been in connection with Levites, but the original comment, on "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion," was this:

Your use of "cleromancy" intrigues me. It has such affinity with the word "cleric" that it could almost mean "divination by a cleric". And aren't you a sort of cleric?

Cleromancy is quite similar to clergyman, and here Wade linked the word to the synonym cleric (an Islamic or D&D word not nearly as inherently funny as clergyman), which brought the poem about the singing rill back to mind. Subsequent comments by Wade twice used the phrase "cleric or priest," singling out a particular sort of clergyman.

To virtually no one else on earth does the word rill have any connection with priests or clergymen, so I thought it was quite a coincidence to run into this in my reading today -- from Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess, as quoted by Wendy Berg in Red Tree, White Tree (ellipsis in Berg):

Now the Priest of the Moon ... had seen that the seership had fallen on evil days, and had gone back, as men must, to an older and purer faith, tracing the river to the rill till he came to the pure source