Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/397

 Rh before reaching Crewe, following the general course of the river all the way. To the north, the ground, broken by hills and river-valleys, yet gradually rises to the Moorlands, a bleak, bare, stone-walled country, abutting on the Derbyshire moors. The hills on the south-west do not attain so great a height, and they are not bleak, but black; for here, around Wolverhampton, is the seat of the South Staffordshire iron trade. Thus you will perceive that tht)ugh the Black Country is chiefly in Staffordshire, yet Staffordshire is not in the Black Country, according to the popular delusion.

We have, then, a large agricultural tract in the midst of the county, with the Black Country, peopled by colliers and ironworkers, in the south, and a smaller industrial tract, the Potteries, around Stoke-on-Trent, in the north. There are, besides, other local industries—brewing at Burton, shoemaking at Stafford, silk-weaving at Leek Does this diversity of environment and occupation beget a corresponding diversity of folklore? you will naturally ask; and to this point I shall mainly address myself in this paper.

The agricultural population, who are the set with whom I am best acquainted, are great believers in ghosts and apparitions. Everywhere there are cross-roads which it is supposed to be dangerous to pass, stiles where clanking chains may be heard, lanes where black dogs and spectral horsemen rush past the belated wanderer. It is comparatively an ordinary occurrence for this or that lately deceased person to "come again" after death. A labourer at Norbury, in North Staffordshire, known to all my family, heard that his brother, lately dead at Sowdley, five or six miles away, "came again" at a certain stile. He "thought he'd best look into it; he doubted as how his brother might have summat to say; he thought as it was but right as some of the family should see him if he did come;" so he set out one evening after his day's work was done, and walked the five miles through the dark, dirty lanes to Sowdley, waited