Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/104

76 Nablûs. Sometimes persons, apparently in the last stage of illness, are carried to the top of the mountain and fed with the holy mutton, after which they are able to walk home.

Such examples of the continuity of human emotion might be still further multiplied. They are obvious enough and meet one at every turn, but are mysteriously ignored—perhaps never even observed—by most of those concerned to illustrate the Bible by the land. The amount of folk-lore, folk-songs, customs, which might have been collected during the sixty years at least in which England has spent tens of thousands a year on mission work in this country, is grievous to think of. Happily others more recent have been more active, and all folk-lorists owe a debt of gratitude to the Americans, Curtiss, Bliss, and Post; to the Germans, Klein, Mrs. Einsler and her learned father Dr. Schick, and perhaps in this connection above all, to the Alsatian brothers Baldensperger, whose articles, now scattered in various inaccessible Reports, deserve to be collected and edited.