Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/331

 Rh up a will by which some property was so disposed of, having been burnt in effigy on the next 5th of November!

These ideas, it will be observed, form the groundwork of most ghost stories. A pledge unredeemed, a covenant unfulfilled, a secret treasure unrevealed, an unjust will, or a just one disregarded, condemn the unhappy spirit to walk the earth until the wrong is righted. But what practical knowledge of the folk shows us is, that these are not mere arbitrary incidents of the folk-tales, but living principles of action.

Another strong characteristic of the country folk is the suspicion with which they regard strangers and people not of their own sort. This shows itself in a hundred ways: from the difficulty of persuading them to believe in the advantages of any plan proposed by a lady or gentleman, compared to the ease with which they accept the propositions of the merest acquaintance belonging to their own class, to the “Heave half a brick at him”, which was the proverbial reception accorded to strangers in the mining villages of Lancashire. Tribal enmity itself, indeed, may be said to survive in the contempt with which the uneducated English regard the Irish or Welsh (I have heard a woman indignantly deny any knowledge of the Welsh language, as if it would have been something to be ashamed of), the East Anglians and Kentishmen regard the dwellers in “the sheeres”, and, generally, the natives of every county regard the natives of every other county. Hundreds of little sayings testify to this feeling. The Shropshire folk say that the Cheshire men “live at the best end of the pig-trough”, in derision of the quantity of milk and whey they used to drink. The Staffordshire people call giving away something one has no further use for, “making a Shropshire present,” and so forth. The lower you go in the scale the narrower is the favoured circle. Contemptuous rhymes on the neighbouring villages are common, I fancy, in all counties; but I have even met with a case where the various townships of one parish had