Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/75

 Rh has been acted over and over again in savage society, told over and over again to savage children, not exclusively in any particular part of the world, but during a particular stage of culture, and could therefore have arisen independently anywhere where the same savage conditions attended the marriage of young women. If this is the theory stigmatised as casual by Mr. Jacobs, it will not die under the name.

Jamieson, in a note to one of his ballads, relates an event which happened to him in Scotland which almost exactly reproduces some of the events told in Scottish fairy tales, showing that we are too apt to judge of these fragments of the past by the light of modern days:—

"On a very hot day in the beginning of Autumn, the author was travelling afoot over the mountains of Lochaber, from Fort Augustus to Fort Inverness, and when he came to the house where he was to have breakfasted there was no person at home, nor was there any place where refreshment was to be had nearer than Durio, eighteen miles further. With this disagreeable prospect he proceeded about three miles further, and turned aside to the first cottage he saw, where he found a hale-looking, lively, tidy little middle-aged woman spinning wool, with a pot on the fire, and some greens ready to be put into it. She understood no English, and his Gaelic was by no means good. She informed him that she had nothing in the house that could be eaten except cheese, a little sour cream, and some whiskey. On being asked rather sharply how she could dress the greens without meal, she 'good-humouredly told him that there was plenty of meal in the croft, pointing to some unreaped barley that stood dead ripe and dry before the door; and if he could wait half an hour he should have brose and butter, bread and cheese, bread and milk, or anything he chose. To this he most readily consented, as well on account of the singularity of the proposal as of the necessity of the time; and the good dame set with all possible expedition about her arduous undertaking. She first of all brought him some cream in a bottle, telling him, ' He that will not work, neither shall he eat'; if he wished for butter, he must shake that bottle with all his might and sing to it like a mavis all the while;