Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/174

166 the dead the offspring of the conviction that their envy and their malice and their greed are likely to get the better of ours, since we live for a season, but they are dead for all time? Of these two alternatives (the only ones which suggest themselves to me) I am disposed to adopt the latter. I believe that there was a golden age when people's desires were more limited, and the home, with its speaking and silent inmates, was one. Then the first man who quarrelled (say with his mother-in-law, because she pretended to want things which she did not) came to regard with augmented dread and aversion the deceased mothers-in-law of his progenitors—more mighty because more eternal; the primitive view of humanity being that, in the words of Wesley's great hymn, "One family we dwell in Him, although divided by the stream, the narrow stream of death", but that our relations who have "passed the flood" are sure of outlasting ourselves, who may be drowned in it.

But, as I have said, it is possible for the faint light of vague speculation to play round this tree; there is no shaft of lightning yet forged which will pierce to its roots. This abrupt reversal of the attitude of the living towards the dead is not the least remarkable phenomenon in the history of mankind.

of the Society and the of  have much pleasure in acknowledging a letter from Mr. in which the veteran folk-lorist warmly commends the work of the Society, and, as a token of his appreciation, encloses £l towards paying off the deficit incurred by the Society in connection with the Second International Folk-Lore Congress. May he find as many imitators as he has friends and admirers among the members of the Folk-Lore Society!