Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/414



all know that stories never die. A good thing told about a wit of any remote date is attached, in all following generations, to a series of later humorists. The famous Beresford ghost story (the basis of Scott's ballad, "The Eve of St. John"), is not only found in a chronicle of the twelfth century, and in a sequence of tales ever since, but is actually current to-day with a living lady for the heroine! Finally, the inventions of pre-historic antiquity, which are the stock-in-trade of Household Tales, peasant Märchen, and early epics, are localised in various places. The incidents of an European ballad are said to have occurred, for example, at the meeting-place of Ettrick and Yarrow, or beside the troutful Douglas burn.

This fact, the tendency to revive and renovate old stories by giving them a contemporary date and a familiar locality, is now perfectly well understood. But I have found a puzzling case of "story bi-location," and would be glad to know how we are to explain it. Did the self-same strange thing happen twice, or more frequently, on either side of the Atlantic, within some twenty years, or is the European narrative a deliberate plagiarism from West Indian facts?

Though the dead are the sufferers in this affair (and