Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/317

 Correspondence^ 299

with my informant. We must first of all get on terms of easy conversation. It is much better not to press questions, but to pause and wait for answers, as the best things are generally volunteered. A good deal depends on the humour in which the collector happens to be for the time being. If he finds that he is not able to smile, joke, and make himself agreeable, he will not make much progress. The thing must be done easily, naturally, and without importunity.

I think it is impossible to lay down any rule as to what class of people best preserve folklore. The people who preserve it worst are the voluble busybodies who think they have read something and know something. I should say that the people who seldom or never read know most. It is a good thing to employ a maid- servant whom one can trust to make inquiries about beliefs and magical charms, as those are the matters on which people are most reticent. What she reports can then be written down and afterwards verified. I find that people are much more ready to talk to one of their own class, for the educated can never be quite in touch with the uneducated.

In writing a thing down it is best to use the very words ond dialect, if possible, of the narrator, and one should try to avoid translating into conventional or literary form.

The whole art consists in perseverance, and setting people at their ease. These are things which cannot be taught. I have sometimes failed in setting people at their ease, because I have been in too great a hurry. In small country villages people are never in a hurry, and the habits of precision and of getting at once to the root of things, which are practised in taking evidence in courts of justice, would be out of place in deahng with such a tender plant as folklore.

I have sometimes made presents of books dealing with folklore to show people that I am in earnest, and that what they are going to tell me is by no means a matter for ridicule, but a subject for serious inquiry. I have got some of my best things in that way. The book reminds people of other things which they cannot think of all at once.

Sidney O. Addy.

My own (purely English) experience of collecting leads me to draw a great distinction between the collection of the different