Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/335

 Rh course, among the lower classes cannot well be collected direct from them, because they really do not understand what superstition is, and cannot, as they say, “make out what the gentleman is driving at.” They must be inquired for among the class of small employers, who have a little more cultivation than their workpeople, but yet live on terms of sufficient familiarity with them to know their ideas thoroughly and to share a good many of them! A little patient effort will in all probability enable the collector to make the acquaintance of some old grandfather or grandmother of this class, who, sitting in the chimneycorner of some old-fashioned kitchen, loves nothing better than to pour out tales of “old times”. Here is the collector’s opportunity! and from talk of sickles, spinning-wheels, and tinder-boxes, he may lead the conversation to matters more purely folk-loric. A list of annual festivals, and the chief customs connected with them, will be found a useful basis for questions. If his witness proves intelligent and comprehending, a list of common superstitions may then be produced and gone through, when a few additions will probably be made to it. A list of proverbs will almost certainly prove a success; the “old sayings” will be thought extremely interesting, both wise and witty, and the memory ransacked for similar ones. Local legends must, of course, be asked for as local features—hill or well, ruined castle or Roman camp—suggest, and will probably vary greatly, ranging from ghost stories to folk-etymology. Märchen, in my experience, are scarcely to be found; but ballads, which are folk-tales in verse, are not nearly so rare as is sometimes supposed, but it is seldom that any but old people know them.

They are excellent company, these old people! if one can but get them to talk of their past lives, and not of their present ailments; and they are dying around us every day, and their traditions are dying with them, for they