Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/157

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I GATHERED these tales and sayings from the mouths of the folk in the summer of 1859, and to all the kind friends from whom I got this lore I offer, after many years, my warmest thanks.

Of these stories two were printed by the late Mr. J. F. Campbell in his interesting Collection of the Tales of the West Highlands; the others are added to-day for the first time to that store of old-world knowledge which the Folk-Lore Society is intended to preserve. It was difficult in 1859 to make such a collection, but it would be impossible now to gather them in Sutherland. The measured prose of some of the tales would suggest that at one time they may have been actual compositions, but what is called "reading" has now supplied a substitute for this unwritten literature, which is being further banished by bigoted religious ideas and by modern progress in all its shapes. "Other times" inevitably bring their proverbial "other manners," and the relics of popular antiquity are fast vanishing along with the language, the associations, and the primitive life of the people, who are out of touch with their betters and given over to social and polemical hatreds.

Such as this collection is it was my own introduction to folk-lore, to the forgotten history, and to the past in which is buried in the present of the genuine Highland mind—to that primitive literature, in short, which is at once so like and so unlike the mythology of other primitive races.

During the years that the volume has been in my possession I have