Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/166

162 or strong drink from a log of Memel fir, sooner than extract one tear from the brightest eye of the present generation.

"But I scatter none of those antique pearls—those tender and touching narratives, before the eyes of the self-sufficient husbandman and the critical mechanic. I steep not my story now in the dark and fathomless stream of superstition: I have seen the time when tales and ballads of fairies and elves, and witches and warlocks, and elve candles and water spunkies, and wraiths and ghosts, and goblins and foul fiends, horned or cloven-footed, would have been to one as food and raiment and white money. But the wisdom of man so much abounds that he is pleased with nought; he laughs at ancient beliefs, and calls for ocular proof, and testimony on oath, and the assurance of many witnesses, for all oral or recorded things. The poetry has departed from story-telling, conjured away by the wand of that sorcerer, education. Not that I mean to aver that all else is as husks and bran, compared to the white and the purified grain. I have had curious adventures of my own, in which the most querulous matter-of-fact man could detect neither superstition nor poetry. These, falling from the lips of one blessed with a natural grace of utterance, might go far to move men to mirth; but I can hope for no such consummation."

The old man adjusted his mantle, stood perpendicularly up, and, combing his white locks with his fingers, commenced his narrative with something of a look and tone at once grave and shrewd.

"The adventures I shall relate commenced with my seventeenth year. I had learned to sing, and also to dance; but Nature, which lavishes so many notable gifts, denied me that ready and familiar grace of address which wins its way to woman's regard. I conversed with the maids whom the music of the fiddle surrendered to my company with such manifest confusion, and even alarm, that they soon reckoned me a creature equally uncouth and ungracious; and I was subjected to abundance of scorn and caprice and wit, when I endeavoured at gallantry. When I led them to the floor, they would examine me from head to foot, with an eye sparkling in malicious wit; and even their grandmothers regarded me with a glance of the most mortifying compassion. It was sometimes a matter of rivalry among the girls to obtain my hand: to dance with such a cutter of uncouth capers, such a marvellous piece of human imperfection as