Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/15

Rh in a neighbouring village or praise some custom there observed, and the peasant's parochial patriotism is up in arms to prove the superiority of his native hamlet. You show perhaps some signs of incredulity (but not until your informant is well launched upon his panegyric), and his wounded pride bids him call in his neighbours to corroborate his story. Or again you may hint at a little largesse, not of course for your host—only witches and the professional reciters of folk-tales and ballads are entitled to a fee—but on behalf of his children, and he may pardon and satisfy what might otherwise have seemed too inquisitive a curiosity.

Such are the folk to whom I am most beholden, and how shall I fitly acknowledge my debt to them? Their very names maybe were unknown to me even then, or at the most a 'John' or 'George' sufficed; and they in turn knew not that I was in their debt. You, muleteers and boatmen, who drove shrewd bargains for your services and gave unwittingly so much beside, and you too, cottagers, who gave a night's lodging to a stranger and never guessed that your chatter was more prized than your shelter, how shall I thank you? Not severally, for I cannot write nor could you ever read the list of acknowledgements due; but to you all, Georges and Johns, Demetris and Constantines, and rare anachronistic Epaminondases, in memory of services rendered unawares, greeting from afar and true gratitude!

Nor must I omit to mention the assistance which I have derived from written sources. In recent times it has been a favourite amusement with Greeks of some education to compile little histories of the particular district or island in which they live, and many of these contain a chapter devoted to the customs and superstitions of the locality. From these, as also from the records of travel in Greece, particularly those of French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have culled much that is valuable.

Nearly ten years have passed since my return from Greece, and such leisure as they have allowed has been devoted to co-ordinating the piecemeal information which I personally obtained or have gathered from the writings of others, and to examining its bearing upon the life and thought of Ancient Greece. In the former half of this task I have but followed in the steps of Bernhard Schmidt and of Polites, who had already presented a coherent, if still incomplete, account of the folklore of Modern