Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/458

402 Of each, in turn, I would like to say a few words. "The Flying Childer" was told me under that name, though, considering the tale itself, it might as appropriately have been called anything else. I regret to say I can remember little about the person who told it to me; I never knew his name. I met him in a small inn some distance from where I lived, where I had one day to spend an hour; and except that he came from the Wolds, and that I afterwards saw him once or twice driving towards the market- town, I know no more of him. He did not believe in bogles nor witches; but he confessed to a good many superstitions, and to a real dread of the Evil Eye, which he declared he knew to be a true and terrible thing.

He was a poor story-teller, and did not seem to realise the incoherency of the tale. He said quite simply that he did not suppose it was true, but he implied a very strong reservation as to murderers being pursued, after death, by their victims. I also found that he believed—and I think it is not an uncommon theory—that all dead persons are "bogles", capable of feeling, speaking, appearing to living eyes, and of working good and evil, till corruption has finally completed its work, and the bodies no longer exist.

These two ideas granted as possible beliefs, the tale is no longer quite so uninteresting or absurd as it seems on first sight, and it may be that it was very different in its original form. There can be little doubt that it is either vastly incomplete, or has become confused with another tale, which, perhaps, fills the gap where the true version has been forgotten. However it came to pass, it is certain that the whole episode of the Tailor, the Wise Woman, and the Old Man, is apt to make the reader quote Mr. Kipling, and exclaim, "But that is another story!"

I should like to add that cutting off the feet and hands of a dead body often occurs in folk-tales, though I cannot remember that it has ever been remarked on. In Lincolnshire, I found it appearing in Jack the Giant-Killer, Beauty