Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/157

Rh gained from several sources. One, which I call "The Dead Moon", I first heard of in a sort of nursery rhyme some children were singing, I have listened to awesome tales of "boggarts" and "todlowries" that have still local habitations as well as names; and to weird stories of witches, and woe-women and their spells, till I nearly believed in them myself; and to strange, rambling histories that seemed like peeps into a bygone world, where the fantastic spirits were more real than the trembling, fearing, conciliating people they alternately helped and oppressed. I fear I cannot preserve the rude poetry and grace of the vernacular; but I tell these stories of the Cars of the Ancholme Valley exactly as told to me, lest in altering I might spoil them. I heard the first from an aged woman, a life-long dweller in these Cars, who in her young days herself observed the rite she describes, though she would not confess to it within the hearing of her grand-children, whose indifference and disbelief shocked her greatly. To her, "Tiddy Mun" was a perfect reality, and one to be loved as well as feared. She is now dead, and I doubt whether anyone else knows the legend, which she said had been forgotten for many, many years, by all but herself and one or two old friends, all gone before her.

I think the legend is, if not so poetical as some, at least a curious one; and particularly so, as showing the innately heathen idea of propitiation by offerings. There is an inconsequence and an incompleteness about it for which I am not responsible; I tell it as it was told to me, and I have tried to keep to the old woman's words as closely as possible, only changing them where they would certainly not be "understanded of the people" without an intimate knowledge of the dialect.

Whiles syne, afore tha dykes wor made, an' tha river-bed changed, whan tha Cars wor nobbut bog-lands, an' full o' watter-holes; tha wor teemin, as thou mayst a' heerd wi'