Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/511

Rh I.

belief in fairies being practically universal, the type of fairy-story must be monotonous in its sameness. No doubt much of this sameness is due to intercommunication of countries and districts, and much also to the likeness in the trend of human thought the world over. There may, therefore, be very little new in the stories about fairies, witches, etc., which I propose to give as told to me by various persons in the Isle of Skye. That island, though now devastated by motors, English shooting tenants, and unintelligent tourists, remains, nevertheless, a stronghold of the old ways and the old ideas. People cling with a religious fervour, and all religion is fervid there, to their old speech, and an outsider remains an outsider for a long time. I speak of the years before the Great War, for that terrible upheaval, appealing to the most patriotic of races, sent its girls to make munitions and drive Glasgow tramcars, and its young men to die in hundreds for their country. My connection with the island was, to my sorrow, severed before the War, and my folklore was gathered before that date. A want of Gaelic handicapped me, but there were intelligent maidservants, who put into good and grammatical English the stories told by those who had not the tongue of the alien. My informants lived, all of them, in or near Portree, but that signified little in an island where distance means nothing, and where aged women walked twenty-six miles to and from a Communion service. The minds of my informants could have been little influenced, if at all, by the printed book, for most could read no English, and some had never seen a railway train. I regret to say that much of the reading of the younger generation was confined to newspapers and "noavelles," otherwise penny novelettes, but from these I derived nothing. If they knew any folklore, it was vulgar and "far-back" to admit the knowledge. I do not know if the most beautiful of islands has been desecrated by a cinema, but if so, it only needed that to complete the overthrow of refinement and culture.

My informants, though living near Portree, belonged in some