Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/74

 66 to speak to him, and when he became ill she attended to him, but in silence. After his recovery she took a little girl and set off for his kraal, under cover of the night, that she might have an interview without creating suspicion. The entrance was closed, but she threw a stone upon the Kut. Then, after a scene with her lover, she fixed her value at ten cows, told him when he had worked long enough to obtain that number she would come to his kraal and be betrothed. Some time afterwards she appeared unexpectedly at her lover's kraal, and demanded to be betrothed. But the people were afraid to kill the goat without the chief's sanction, and a messenger being sent to their chief, she was obliged to go back. Again, however, she presented herself at her lover's hut, and this time, in spite of the chief's rights, the goat was killed, and she became the wife of her old lover.

This real-life incident is told in Shooter's Kaffirs of Natal and the Zulu Country (pp. 60-71), and I do not think it is difficult to transpose its facts to the domain of the folk-tale. Let the mother relate her adventures to her children, and they in their turn relate it to their children, and it is questionable whether the tradition would represent a very distant parallel to the folk-tale proper. Look at the Kaffir folk-tale, indeed. In Theal's Kaffir Folk-lore the story of Sikulume, so marvellously like many European stories in the trials that beset the lovers, is not so much unlike the narrative given above; the difficulties and trials are, of course, taken to the region of the marvellous, but their true origin might well be found in the actual facts of savage life. And a consideration of such facts ought to help forward the question as to whether the incidents of folk-tales are simply due to a borrowing from literature or to the personified nature-gods being made actors in legends, or whether they do not rather add to "the evidence in favour of myths being ordinarily formed round a nucleus of facts". The Kaffir maiden's story is one that