Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/328

 322 its folk-lore can be taken as evidence of the stock from which it has sprung. This question can only, so it seems to me, be solved by watching what goes on nowadays when two races come in contact. The negroes in the United States have adopted many of the little superstitions of their masters, and have discarded their own; but one cannot rest an argument upon a solitary example; and the folk-lore of the Irish and Welsh inhabitants of English towns, compared with the folk-lore of Ireland or Wales on the one hand, and with the local English folk-lore on the other, might furnish further evidence.

IV.—But there is yet another ground on which I would wish to press the importance of the personal collection of English folk-lore, and that is, the benefit of the students themselves. For if you wish to understand folk-lore, you must learn to understand the folk. You must study the pearls in the oyster-beds, and not only after they have been gathered, and polished, and set—though it be in gold—for the public eye. You must know what the folk think, and how they act, on subjects such as folk-lore touches, and observe how their minds form the natural background to the superstitions they act on, the customs they practise, the tales they tell.

I remember being greatly struck with this idea when a country cottager’s wife one day detailed to me her contrivances for replenishing her slender wardrobe before going to visit her daughter and son-in-law at Liverpool. “For you see, ma’am”, she wound up, “his mother” [the son-in-law’s] “is very respectable, and I shouldn’t like him to cast it up to Mary when I was gone that her mother wasn’t the same. For men will do such things, you know, ma’am.” One half-expected her to point her remarks by the story of some elfin bride who left her husband because (like Diarmaid of the Feen) he reminded her how she “came to him ragged and dirty, and her hair was down to her heels”.

Moreover, you will observe that my friend spoke of her