Page:More English Fairy Tales.djvu/253

 play of fancy. "Once upon a time and a very good time it was, though it wasn't in my time nor in your time nor in any one else's time," is effective enough for a fairy epoch, and is common, according to Mayhew (London Labour, iii.), among tramps. We have the rhyming formula:

on which I have variants not so refined. Some stories start off without any preliminary formula, or with a simple "Well, there was once a——" A Scotch formula reported by Mrs. Balfour runs, "Once on a time when a' muckle folk were wee and a' lees were true," while Mr. Lang gives us "There was a king and a queen as mony ane's been, few have we seen and as few may we see." Endings of stories are even less varied. "So they married and lived happy ever afterwards," comes from folk-tales, not from novels. "All went well that didn't go ill," is a somewhat cynical formula given by Mrs. Balfour, while the Scotch have "they lived happy and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappie."

In the course of the tale the chief thing to be noticed is the occurrence of rhymes in the prose narrative, tending to give the appearance of a cante-fable. I have enumerated those occurring in English Fairy Tales in the Notes to Childe Rowland (No. xxi.). In the present volume rhyme occurs in Nos. xlvi., xlviii., xlix., lviiii., lx., lxiii. (see Note), lxiv., lxxiv., lxxxi., lxxxv., while lv., lxix., lxxiii., lxxvi., lxxxiii., lxxxiv., are either in verse themselves or derived from verse versions. Altogether one-third of our collection gives evidence in favour of the cante-fable theory which I adduced in my notes to Childe Rowland. Another point of interest in English folk-narrative is the repetition of verbs of motion, "So he went along and went along and went along." Still more curious is a frequent change of tense from the English present to the past. "So he gets up and went along." All this helps to give the colloquial and familiar air to the English fairy-tale, not to mention the dialectal and archaic words and phrases which occur in them.

But their very familiarity and colloquialism make them remarkably effective with English-speaking little ones. The rhythmical phrases stick in their memories; they can remember the exact phraseology of