Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/376

 370 The MSS. interesting to the folk-lorist fall into four classes:—

(a.) The, which I was not able to do more than glance at cursorily, but which would repay attentive study.

(b.) A volume lettered “”.

This MS., completed in 1870, was offered for publication to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., and refused by them in a letter dated July 1, 1870. The author looked through it in 1877, and noted that it would be unadvisable to publish it as it stood. In 1881 he again looked through it, and noted that it contained “honest, hard work”. There is no index, only a brief list of contents, which I transcribe as some indication of the nature and scope of the work. The figures in brackets, giving the number of pages allotted to each subject, are Campbell’s:

thus making a total of 273 pages, exclusive of the cancelled numbers. The pages are not numbered, and I had no time to check Campbell’s calculation, but I should roughly estimate the total number of pages at 350, equal to a similar number of fairly closely printed demy octavo pages.

In the last quarter of the volume I noted an unpublished Highland märchen, entitled The Black Horse, of which the following is a very brief abstract:

A king dies, and after a year his property is divided, and the youngest son (hero) gets a “limping white garron”. He sets forth on his travels and meets a mysterious stranger, who proposes to give him for his white garron a black horse having this property: “there is no place you can think of in the four parts of the wheel of the world that he will not take you there.” Hero accepts, and forthwith wishes himself in the realm of Under