Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/355

 Rh readiness to cusanu ol ei thraed, that is, to do on his knees all the stages of her path across the meadow, kissing the ground wherever it has been honoured with the tread of her dainty foot. Let me take another case, in which the cord of association is not so inconceivably slender, when two or more persons standing in a close relation to one another are mistakenly treated a little too much as if mutually independent, the objection may be made that it matters not whether it is A or B, that it is, in fact, all the same, as they belong to the same concern: in Welsh this is sometimes expressed by saying, Yr un peth yw Huw'r Glyn a'i glocs, that is, "Whether you talk of Huw'r Glyn, or of his wooden shoes, it is all the same." Then, when you speak in English of a man "standing in another's shoes", I am by no means certain that you are not employing an expression which meant something more to those who first used it than it does to us. Our modern idioms, with all their straining after the abstract, are but primitive man's mental tools adapted to the requirements of civilised life: they betray the form and shape which the neolithic worker's chipping and polishing gave them.

It is difficult to arrange these scraps under any clearly classified headings, and now that I have led you into the midst of matters magical, perhaps I may just as well go on to the mention of a few more: I alluded to the boiling of the herbs according to the charmer's orders, with the result, among other things, of bringing the witch to the spot. This is, however, not the only instance of the importance and strange efficacy of fire. For when a beast dies on a farm, of course it dies, according to the old-fashioned view of things, as I understand it, from the influence of the evil eye, or the interposition of a witch; and if you want to know to whom you are indebted for the loss of the beast, you have simply to burn its carcase in the open air and watch who comes first on the spot or who first passes by; for that is the criminal to be charged with the death of the animal, and he cannot help coming there;