Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/394

 386 Folk- Lore Miscellanea.

Of course, I cannot vouch for the correctness of this story, which has travelled to Oxford from the Highlands. It may- be taken as illustrative of practices which prevailed not so very long ago in other parts of Britain. And yet to what thoughts it must give rise in the mind of historians, who have eyes for other things than the intrigues alone of kings and their creatures ! Here we are, as it were, witnesses to the fetching of rust-eaten weapons from the armoury of the most primitive religion in the world, in order to be used in the warfare of the most modern of theologies. What a strange rencontre between the medicine-man of hoary antiquity, with his bag of Druidic tricks, and the academical divine who fortifies John Knox's tenets with patches of fashionable philosophy !

John Rhys.