This throws some light on Silly Frit, and we know where we are; but the story is inconsequent, and far from representing the original. We cannot, however, reconstruct it quite on the lines of Grimm’s or Clodd’s version. But I happened to mention my difficulty one day to Dr. J. A. H. Murray, when he assured me of the existence of a Scottish version in which the fairy is a female. He learnt it when he was a child, he said, at Denholm, in Roxburghshire; and he was afterwards charmed to read it in Robert Chambers’ Popular Rhymes of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1858), pp. 221–5, whence Mr. Clodd has given an abstract of it in his ‘Philosophy of Rumpelstiltskin.’ Among those popular rhymes the reader will find it as related at length by Nurse Jenny in her inimitable fashion; but the Scotch is so broad, that I think it advisable, at the risk of some havoc to the local colouring, to southronize it somewhat as follows:—

‘I see that you are fond of talks about fairies, children; and a story about a fairy and the goodwife of Kittlerumpit has just come into my mind; but I can’t very well tell you now whereabouts Kittlerumpit lies. I think it is somewhere in the Debatable Ground; anyway I shall not pretend to know more than I do, like everybody nowadays. I wish they would remember the ballad we used to sing long ago:—

But howsoever about Kittlerumpit: the goodman was a rambling sort of body; and he went to a fair one day, and not only never came home again, but nevermore was heard of. Some said he ‘listed, and others that the tiresome pressgang snatched him up, though he was furnished with a wife and a child to boot. Alas! that wretched pressgang! They went about the country like roaring lions, seeking whom they might devour. Well do I remember how my eldest brother Sandy was all but smothered in the meal-chest, hiding from those rascals. After they were gone, we pulled him out from among the meal, puffing and crying, and as white as any corpse. My mother had to pick the meal out of his mouth with the shank of a horn spoon.

‘Ah well, when the goodman of Kittlerumpit was gone, the goodwife was left with small means. Little resources had she, and a baby boy at her breast. All said they were sorry for her; but nobody helped her—which is a common case, sirs. Howsoever the goodwife had a sow, and that was her only consolation; for the sow was soon to farrow, and she hoped for a good litter.

‘But we all know hope is fallacious. One day the woman goes to the sty to fill the sow’s trough; and what does she find but the sow lying on her back, grunting and groaning, and ready to give up the ghost.

‘I trow this was a new pang to the goodwife’s heart; so she sat down on the knocking-stone37, with her bairn on her knee, and cried sorer than ever she did for the loss of her own goodman.

‘Now I premise that the cottage of Kittlerumpit was built on a brae, with a large fir-wood behind it, of which you may hear more ere we go far on. So the goodwife, when she was wiping her eyes, chances to look down the brae; and what does she see but an old woman, almost like a lady, coming slowly up the road. She was dressed in green, all but a short white apron and a black velvet hood, and a steeple-crowned beaver hat on her head. She had a long walking-staff, as long as herself, in her hand—the sort of staff that old men and old women helped themselves with long ago; I see no such staffs now, sirs.

‘Ah well, when the goodwife saw the green gentlewoman near her, she rose and made a curtsy; and “Madam,” quoth she, weeping, “I am one of the most misfortunate women alive.”

‘ “I don’t wish to hear pipers’ news and fiddlers’ tales, goodwife,” quoth the green woman. “I know you have lost your goodman—we had worse losses at the Sheriff Muir38; and I know that your sow is unco sick. Now what will you give me if I cure her?”

‘ “Anything your ladyship’s madam likes,” quoth the witless goodwife, never guessing whom she had to deal with.

‘ “Let us wet thumbs on that bargain,” quoth the green woman; so thumbs were wetted, I warrant you; and into the sty madam marches.

‘She looks at the sow with a long stare, and then began to mutter to herself what the goodwife couldn’t well understand; but she said it sounded like—

‘Then she took out of her pocket a wee bottle, with something like oil in it; and she rubs the sow with it above the snout, behind the ears, and on the tip of the tail. “Get up, beast,” quoth the green woman. No sooner said than done—up jumps the sow with a grunt, and away to her trough for her breakfast.

‘The goodwife of Kittlerumpit was a joyful goodwife now, and would have kissed the very hem of the green woman’s gowntail; but she wouldn’t let her. “I am not so fond of ceremonies,” quoth she; “but now that I have righted your sick beast, let us end our settled bargain. You will not find me an unreasonable, greedy body—I like ever to do a good turn for a small reward: all I ask, and will have, is that baby boy in your bosom.”

‘The goodwife of Kittlerumpit, who now knew her customer, gave a shrill cry like a stuck swine. The green woman was a fairy, no doubt; so she prays, and cries, and begs, and scolds; but all wouldn’t do. “You may spare your din,” quoth the fairy, “screaming as if I was as deaf as a door-nail; but this I’ll let you know—I cannot, by the law we live under, take your bairn till the third day; and not then, if you can tell me my right name.” So madam goes away round the pig-sty end; and the goodwife falls down in a swoon behind the knocking-stone.

‘Ah well, the goodwife of Kittlerumpit could not sleep any that night for crying, and all the next day the same, cuddling her bairn till she nearly squeezed its breath out; but the second day she thinks of taking a walk in the wood I told you of; and so with the bairn in her arms, she sets out, and goes far in among the trees, where was an old quarry-hole, grown over with grass, and a bonny spring well in the middle of it. Before she came very near, she hears the whirring of a flax wheel, and a voice singing a song; so the woman creeps quietly among the bushes, and peeps over the brow of the quarry; and what does she see but the green fairy tearing away at her wheel, and singing like any precentor:—

‘ “Ha, ha!” thinks the woman, “I’ve got the mason’s word at last; the devil give them joy that told it!” So she went home far lighter than she came out, as you may well guess—laughing like a madcap with the thought of cheating the old green fairy.

‘Ah well, you must know that this goodwife was a jocose woman, and ever merry when her heart was not very sorely overladen. So she thinks to have some sport with the fairy; and at the appointed time she puts the bairn behind the knocking-stone, and sits on the stone herself. Then she pulls her cap over her left ear and twists her mouth on the other side, as if she were weeping; and an ugly face she made, you may be sure. She hadn’t long to wait, for up the brae climbs the green fairy, neither lame nor lazy; and long ere she got near the knocking-stone she screams out—“Goodwife of Kittlerumpit, you know well what I come for—stand and deliver!”

‘The woman pretends to cry harder than before, and wrings her hands, and falls on her knees, with “Och, sweet madam mistress, spare my only bairn, and take the wretched sow!”

‘ “The devil take the sow, for my part,” quoth the fairy; “I come not here for swine’s flesh. Don’t be contramawcious, huzzy, but give me the child instantly!”

‘ “Ochone, dear lady mine,” quoth the crying goodwife; “forgo my poor bairn, and take me myself!”

‘ “The devil is in the daft jade,” quoth the fairy, looking like the far end of a fiddle; “I’ll bet she is clean demented. Who in all the earthly world, with half an eye in his head, would ever meddle with the likes of thee?”

‘I trow this set up the woman of Kittlerumpit’s bristle: for though she had two blear eyes and a long red nose besides, she thought herself as bonny as the best of them. So she springs off her knees, sets the top of her cap straight, and with her two hands folded before her, she makes a curtsy down to the ground, and, “In troth, fair madam,” quoth she, “I might have had the wit to know that the likes of me is not fit to tie the worst shoe-strings of the high and mighty princess, Whuppity Stoorie.”

‘If a flash of gunpowder had come out of the ground it couldn’t have made the fairy leap higher than she did; then down she came again plump on her shoe-heels; and whirling round, she ran down the brae, screeching for rage, like an owl chased by the witches.

‘The goodwife of Kittlerumpit laughed till she was like to split; then she takes up her bairn, and goes into her house, singing to it all the way:—

That is practically Chambers’ version of this Scottish story; and as to the name of the fairy Whuppity Stoorie, the first syllable should be the equivalent of English whip, while stoor is a Scotch word for dust in motion: so the editor asks in a note whether the name may not have originated in the notion ‘that fairies were always present in the whirls of dust occasioned by the wind on roads and in streets39.’ But he adds that another version of the story calls the green woman Fittletetot, which ends with the same element as the name Tom Tit Tot and Silly go Dwt. Perhaps, however, the Welsh versions of the story approached nearest to one from Mochdrum in Wigtownshire, published in the British Association’s Papers of the Liverpool Meeting, 1896, p. 613. This story was contributed by the Rev. Walter Gregor, and the name of the fairy in it is Marget Totts: in this we have a wife, who is in great distress, because her husband used to give her so much flax to spin by such and such a day, that the work was beyond human power. A fairy comes to the rescue and takes the flax away, promising to bring it back spun by the day fixed, provided the woman can tell the fairy’s name. The woman’s distress thereupon becomes as great as before, but the fairy was overheard saying as she span, ‘Little does the guidwife ken it, my name is Marget Totts.’ So the woman got her flax returned spun by the day; and the fairy, Marget Totts, went up the chimney in a blaze of fire as the result of rage and disappointment. Here one cannot help seeing that the original, of which this is a clumsy version, must have been somewhat as follows

To come back to Wales, we have there the names Silly Frit and Silly go Dwt, which are those of females. The former name is purely English—Silly Frit, which has been already guessed (p. 66) to mean a silly sprite, or silly apparition, with the idea of its being a fright of a creature to behold: compare the application elsewhere to a fairy changeling of the terms crimbil (p. 263) and cyrfaglach or cryfaglach (p. 450), which is explained as implying a haggard urchin that has been half starved and stunted in its growth. Leaving out of the reckoning this connotation, one might compare the term with the Scottish habit of calling the fairies silly wights, ‘the Happy Wights.’ See J. Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary, where s. v. seily, seely, ‘happy,’ he purports to quote the following lines from ‘the Legend of the Bishop of St. Androis’ in a collection of Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1801), pp. 320–1:—

Similarly, he gives the fairies the name of Seely Court, and cites as illustrating it the following lines from R. Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, (i. 236, and) ii. 189:—

Into Welsh, however, the designation Silly Frit must have come, not from Scotland, but from the Marches; and the history of Sìli go Dwt must be much the same. For, though construed as Welsh, the name would mean the Silly who is go Dwt40, ‘somewhat tidy or natty’; but the dwt (mutated from twt) was suggested doubtless by the tot of such fairy names as Tom Tit Tot. That brings me to another group, where the syllable is trot or trut, and this we have in the Welsh doggerel, mentioned at p. 229, as follows:—

But this name Trwtyn-Tratyn sounds masculine, and not that of a she-fairy such as Silly Frit. The feminine would have been Trwtan-Tratan in the Carnarvonshire pronunciation, and in fact trwtan is to be heard there; but more frequently a kind of derivative trwdlan, meaning an ungainly sort of woman, a drudge, a short-legged or deformed maid of all work. Some Teutonic varieties of this group of stories will be found mentioned briefly in Mr. Clodd’s article on the ‘Philosophy of Rumpelstiltskin41.’ Thus from the Debatable Ground on the borders of England and Scotland there comes a story in which the fairy woman’s name was Habetrot; and he alludes to an Icelandic version in which the name is Gillitrut; but for us still more interest attaches to the name in the following rhyme42:—

This has been supposed to belong to a story coming from Ireland; but whether that may prove true or not, it is hardly to be doubted that our Trwtyn Tratyn is practically to be identified with Trit-a-Trot, who is also a he-fairy.

That is not all; for since the foregoing notes were penned, a tale has reached me from Mr. Craigfryn Hughes about a fairy who began by conducting himself like the brownies mentioned at pp. 287, 324–5 above. The passages here in point come from the story of which a part was given at pp. 462–4; and they are to the following effect:—Long ago there was in service at a Monmouthshire farm a young woman who was merry and strong. Who she was or whence she came nobody knew; but many believed that she belonged to the old breed of Bendith y Mamau. Some time after she had come to the farm, the rumour spread that the house was sorely troubled by a spirit. But the girl and the elf understood one another well, and they became the best of friends. So the elf proved very useful to the maid, for he did everything for her—washing, ironing, spinning and twisting wool; in fact they say that he was remarkably handy at the spinning-wheel. Moreover, he expected only a bowlful of sweet milk and wheat bread, or some flummery, for his work. So she took care to place the bowl with his food at the bottom of the stairs every night as she went to bed. It ought to have been mentioned that she was never allowed to catch a sight of him; for he always did his work in the dark. Nor did anybody know when he ate his food: she used to leave the bowl there at night, and it would be empty by the time when she got up in the morning, the bwca having cleared it. But one night, by way of cursedness, what did she do but fill the bowl with some of the stale urine which they used in dyeing wool and other things about the house. But heavens! it would have been better for her not to have done it; for when she got up next morning what should he do but suddenly spring from some corner and seize her by the neck! He began to beat her and kick her from one end of the house to the other, while he shouted at the top of his voice at every kick:—

Meanwhile she screamed for help, but none came for some time; when, however, he heard the servant men getting up, he took to his heels as hard as he could; and nothing was heard of him for some time. But at the end of two years he was found to be at another farm in the neighbourhood, called Hafod yr Ynys, where he at once became great friends with the servant girl: for she fed him like a young chicken, by giving him a little bread and milk all the time. So he worked willingly and well for her in return for his favourite food. More especially, he used to spin and wind the yarn for her; but she wished him in time to show his face, or to tell her his name: he would by no means do either. One evening, however, when all the men were out, and when he was spinning hard at the wheel, she deceived him by telling him that she was also going out. He believed her; and when he heard the door shutting, he began to sing as he plied the wheel:—

‘Ha! ha!’ said the maid at the bottom of the stairs; ‘I know thy name now.’ ‘What is it, then?’ he asked. She replied, ‘Gwarwyn-a-throt’; and as soon as she uttered the words he left the wheel where it was, and off he went. He was next heard of at a farmhouse not far off, where there happened to be a servant man named Moses, with whom he became great friends at once. He did all his work for Moses with great ease. He once, however, gave him a good beating for doubting his word; but the two remained together afterwards for some years on the best possible terms: the end of it was that Moses became a soldier. He went away to fight against Richard Crookback, and fell on the field of Bosworth. The bogie, after losing his friend, began to be troublesome and difficult to live with. He would harass the oxen when they ploughed, and draw them after him everywhere, plough and all; nor could any one prevent them. Then, when the sun set in the evening he would play his pranks again, and do all sorts of mischief about the house, upstairs, and in the cowhouses. So the farmer was advised to visit a wise man (dyn cynnil), and to see if he could devise some means of getting rid of the bogie. He called on the wise man, who happened to be living near Caerleon on the Usk; and the wise man, having waited till the moon should be full, came to the farmer’s house. In due time the wise man, by force of manœuvring, secured the bogie by the very long nose which formed the principal ornament of his face, and earned for him the name of Bwca’r Trwyn, ‘the Bogie of the Nose.’ Whilst secured by the nose, the bogie had something read to him out of the wise man’s big book; and he was condemned by the wise man to be transported to the banks of the Red Sea for fourteen generations, and to be conveyed thither by ‘the upper wind’ (yr uwchwynt). No sooner had this been pronounced by the cunning man than there came a whirlwind which made the whole house shake. Then came a still mightier wind, and as it began to blow the owner of the big book drew the awl out of the bogie’s nose; and it is supposed that the bogie was carried away by that wind, for he never troubled the place any more.

Another version of the story seems to have been current, which represented the bogie as in no wise to blame43: but I attach some importance to the foregoing tale as forming a link of connexion between the Rumpelstiltzchen group of fairies, always trying to get hold of children; the brownie kind, ever willing to serve in return for their simple keep; and the troublesome bogie, that used to haunt Welsh farm houses and delight in breaking crockery and frightening the inmates out of their wits. In fact, the brownie and the bogie reduce themselves here into different humours of the same uncanny being. Their appearance may be said to have differed also: the bogie had a very long nose, while the brownie of Blednoch had only ‘a hole where a nose should have been.’ But one of the most remarkable points about the brownie species is that the Lincolnshire specimen was a small creature, ‘a weeny bit of a fellow’—which suggests a possible community of origin with the banshee of the Irish, and also of the Welsh: witness the wee little woman in the story of the Curse of Pantannas (pp. 188–9), who seems to come up out of the river. All alike may perhaps be said to suggest various aspects of the dead ancestor or ancestress; but Bwca’r Trwyn is not to be severed from the fairy woman in the Pennant Valley, who undertakes some of the duties, not of a dairymaid, as in other cases mentioned, but those of a nurse. Her conduct on being offered a gown is exactly that of the brownie similarly placed: see p. 109 above. But she and Bwca’r Trwyn are unmistakably fairies who take to domestic service, and work for a time willingly and well in return for their food, which, as in the case of other fairies, appears to have been mostly milk.

After this digression I wish only to point out that the Welsh bogie’s name, Gwarwyn-a-throt, treated as Welsh, could only mean white-necked and (or with) a trot; for a throt could only mean ‘and (or with) a trot.’ So it is clear that a throt is simply the equivalent of a-Trot, borrowed from such an English combination as Trit-a-Trot, and that it is idle to translate Gwarwyn-a-throt. Now trot and twt are not native Welsh words; and the same remark applies to Trwtyn Tratyn, and of course to Sìli ffrit and Sìli go Dwt. Hence it is natural to infer that either these names have in the Welsh stories merely superseded older ones of Welsh origin, or else that there was no question of name in the Welsh stories till they had come under English influence. The former conjecture seems the more probable of the two, unless one should rather suppose the whole story borrowed from English sources. But it is of no consequence here as regards the reluctance of fairies to disclose their names; for we have other instances to which the reader may turn, on pp. 45, 87–8, 97 above. One of them, in particular, is in point here: see pp. 54, 61. It attaches itself to the Pool of Corwrion in the neighbourhood of Bangor; and it relates how a man married a fairy on the express condition that he was neither to know her name nor to touch her with iron, on pain of her instantly leaving him. Of course in the lapse of years the conditions are accidentally violated by the luckless husband, and the wife flies instantly away into the waters of the pool: her name turned out to be Belene.

Thus far of the unwillingness of the fairies to tell their names: I must now come to the question, why that was so. Here the anthropologist or the student of comparative folklore comes to our aid; for it is an important part of his business to compare the superstitions of one people with those of another; and in the case of superstitions which have lost their meaning among us, for instance, he searches for a parallel among other nations, where that parallel forms part of living institutions. In this way he hopes to discover the key to his difficulties. In the present case he finds savages who habitually look at the name as part and parcel of the person44. These savages further believe that any part of the person, such as a hair off one’s head or the parings of one’s nails, if they chanced to be found by an enemy, would give that enemy magical power over their lives, and enable him to injure them. Hence the savage tendency to conceal one’s name. I have here, as the reader will perceive, crowded together several important steps in the savage logic; so I must try to illustrate them, somewhat more in detail, by reference to some of the survivals of them after the savage has long been civilized. To return to Wales, and to illustrate the belief that possession of a part of one’s person, or of anything closely identified with one’s person, gives the possessor of it power over that person, I need only recall the Welsh notion, that if one wished to sell one’s self to the devil one had merely to give him a hair of one’s head or the tiniest drop of one’s blood, then one would be for ever his for a temporary consideration. Again, if you only had your hair cut, it must be carefully gathered and hidden away: by no means must it be burnt, as that might prove prejudicial to your health. Similarly, you should never throw feathers into the fire; for that was once held, as I infer, to bring about death among one’s poultry: and an old relative of mine, Modryb Mari, ‘Aunt Mary,’ set her face against my taste for toasted cheese. She used to tell me that if I toasted my cheese, my sheep would waste away and die: strictly speaking, I fancy this originally meant only the sheep from whose milk the cheese had been made. But I was not well versed enough in the doctrines of sympathetic magic to reply, that it did not apply to our cheese, which was not made from sheep’s milk. So her warning used to frighten me and check my fondness for toasted cheese, a fondness which I had doubtless quite innocently inherited, as anybody will see who will glance at one of the Hundred Mery Talys, printed by John Rastell in the sixteenth century, as follows:—‘I fynde wrytten amonge olde gestes, howe God mayde Saynt Peter porter of heuen, and that God of hys goodnes, sone after his passyon, suffered many men to come to the kyngdome of Heuen with small deseruynge; at whyche tyme there was in heuen a great companye of Welchemen, whyche with their crakynge and babelynge troubled all the other. Wherfore God sayde to Saynte Peter that he was wery of them, and that he wolde fayne haue them out of heuen. To whome Saynte Peter sayd: Good Lorde, I warrente you, that shall be done. Wherfore Saynt Peter wente out of heuen gates and cryed wyth a loud voyce Cause bobe45, that is as moche to saye as rosted chese, whiche thynge the Welchemen herynge, ranne out of Heuen a great pace. And when Saynt Peter sawe them all out, he sodenly wente into Heuen, and locked the dore, and so sparred all the Welchemen out. By this ye may se, that it is no wysdome for a man to loue or to set his mynde to moche upon any delycate or worldely pleasure, wherby he shall lose the celestyall and eternall ioye.’

To leave the Mery Talys and come back to the instances mentioned, all of them may be said to illustrate the way in which a part, or an adjunct, answered for the whole of a person or thing. In fact, having due regard to magic as an exact science, an exceedingly exact science, one may say that according to the wisdom of our ancestors the leading axiom of that science practically amounted to this: the part is quite equal to the whole. Now the name, as a part of the man, was once probably identified with the breath of life or with the soul, as we shall see later; and the latter must have been regarded as a kind of matter; for I well remember that when a person was dying in a house, it was the custom about Ponterwyd, in North Cardiganshire, to open the windows. And a farmer near Ystrad Meurig, more towards the south of the county, told me some years ago that he remembered his mother dying when he was a boy: a neighbour’s wife who had been acting as nurse tried to open the window of the room, and as it would not open she deliberately smashed a pane of it. This was doubtless originally meant to facilitate the escape of the soul; and the same idea has been attested for Gloucestershire, Devon, and other parts of the country46. This way of looking at the soul reminds one of Professor Tylor’s words when he wrote in his work on Primitive Culture, i. 440: ‘and he who says that his spirit goes forth to meet a friend, can still realize in the phrase a meaning deeper than metaphor.’

Then if the soul was material, you may ask what its shape was; and even this I have a story which will answer: it comes from the same Modryb Mari who set her face against caws pobi, and cherished a good many superstitions. Therein she differed greatly from her sister, my mother, who had a far more logical mind and a clearer conception of things. Well, my aunt’s story was to the following effect:—A party of reapers on a farm not far from Ponterwyd—I have forgotten the name—sat down in the field to their midday meal. Afterwards they rested awhile, when one of their number fell fast asleep. The others got up and began reaping again, glancing every now and then at the sleeping man, who had his mouth wide open and breathed very loudly. Presently they saw a little black man, or something like a monkey, coming out of his mouth and starting on a walk round the field: they watched this little fellow walking on and on till he came to a spot near a stream. There he stopped and turned back: then he disappeared into the open mouth of the sleeper, who at once woke up. He told his comrades that he had just been dreaming of his walking round the field as far as the very spot where they had seen the little black fellow stop. I am sorry to say that Modryb Mari had wholly forgotten this story when, years afterwards, I asked her to repeat it to me; but the other day I found a Welshman who still remembers it. I happened to complain, at a meeting of kindred spirits, how I had neglected making careful notes of bits of folklore which I had heard years ago from informants whom I had since been unable to cross-examine: I instanced the story of the sleeping reaper, when my friend Professor Sayce at once said that he had heard it. He spent part of his childhood near Ỻanover in Monmouthshire; and in those days he spoke Welsh, which he learned from his nurse. He added that he well remembered the late Lady Ỻanover rebuking his father for having his child, a Welsh boy, dressed like a little Highlander; and he remembered also hearing the story here in question told him by his nurse. So far as he could recall it, the version was the same as my aunt’s, except that he does not recollect hearing anything about the stream of water.

Several points in the story call for notice: among others, one naturally asks at the outset why the other reapers did not wake the sleeping man. The answer is that the Welsh seem to have agreed with other peoples, such as the Irish47, in thinking it dangerous to wake a man when dreaming, that is, when his soul might be wandering outside his body; for it might result in the soul failing to find the way back into the body which it had temporarily left. To illustrate this from Wales I produce the following story, which has been written out for me by Mr. J. G. Evans. The scene of it was a field on the farm of Cadabowen, near Ỻan y Byđair, in the Vale of the Teifi:—‘The chief point of the madfaỻ incident, which happened in the early sixties, was this. During one mid-morning hoe hogi, that is to say, the usual rest for sharpening the reaping-hooks, I was playing among the thirty or forty reapers sitting together: my movements were probably a disturbing element to the reapers, as well as a source of danger to my own limbs. In order, therefore, to quiet me, as seems probable, one of the men directed my attention to our old farm labourer, who was asleep on his back close to the uncut corn, a little apart from the others. I was told that his soul (ened) had gone out of his mouth in the form of a black lizard (madfaỻ đu), and was at that moment wandering among the standing corn. If I woke the sleeper, the soul would be unable to return; and old Thomas would die, or go crazy; or something serious would happen. I will not trust my memory to fill in details, especially as this incident once formed the basis of what proved an exciting story told to my children in their childhood. A generation hence they may be able to give an astonishing instance of “genuine” Welsh folklore. In the meanwhile, I can bear testimony to that “black lizard” being about the most living impression in my “memory.” I see it, even now, wriggling at the edge of the uncut corn. But as to its return, and the waking of the sleeper, my memory is a blank. Such are the tricks of “memory”; and we should be charitable when, with bated breath, the educated no less than the uneducated tell us about the uncanny things they have “seen with their own eyes.” They believe what they say, because they trust their memory: I do not. I feel practically certain I never saw a lizard in my life, in that particular field in which the reapers were.’ Mr. Evans’ story differs, as it has been seen, from my aunt’s version in giving the soul the shape of a lizard; but the little black fellow in the one and the black lizard in the other agree not only in representing the soul as material, but also as forming a complete organism within a larger one. In a word, both pictures must be regarded as the outcome of attempts to depict the sleeper’s inner man.

If names and souls could be regarded as material substances, so could diseases; and I wish to say a word or two now on that subject, which a short story of my wife’s will serve to introduce. She is a native of the Ỻanberis side of Snowdon; and she remembers going one morning, when a small child, across to the neighbourhood of Rhyd-đu with a servant girl called Cadi, whose parents lived there. Now Cadi was a very good servant, but she had little regard for the more civilized manners of the Ỻanberis folk; and when she returned with the child in the evening from her mother’s cottage, she admitted that the little girl was amazed at the language of Cadi’s brothers and sisters; for she confessed that, as she said, they swore like colliers, whereas the little girl had never before heard any swearing worth speaking of. Well, among other things which the little girl saw there was one of Cadi’s sisters having a bad leg dressed: when the rag which had been on the wound was removed, the mother made one of her other children take it out and fix it on the thorn growing near the door. The little girl being inquisitive asked why that was done, and she was told that it was in order that the wound might heal all the faster. She was not very satisfied with the answer, but she afterwards noticed the same sort of thing done in her own neighbourhood. Now the original idea was doubtless that the disease, or at any rate a part of it—and in such matters it will be remembered that a part is quite equal to the whole—was attached to the rag; so that putting the rag out, with a part of the disease attached to it, to rot on the bush, would bring with it the disappearance of the whole disease.

Another and a wider aspect of this practice was the subject of notice in the chapter on the Folklore of the Wells, pp. 359–60, where Mr. Hartland’s hypothesis was mentioned. This was to the effect that if any clothing, or anything else which had been identified with your person, were to be placed in contact with a sacred tree, sacred well, or sacred edifice, it would be involved in the effluence of the divinity that imparts its sacred character to the tree, well, or temple; and that your person, identified with the clothing or other article, would also be involved or soaked in the same divine effluence, and made to benefit thereby. We have since had this kind of reasoning illustrated, pp. 405–7 above, by the modern legend of Crymlyn, and the old one of Ỻyn Ỻiwan; but the difficulty which it involves is a very considerable one: it is the difficulty of taking seriously the infantile order of reasoning which underlies so much of the philosophy of folklore. I cannot readily forget one of the first occasions of my coming, so to say, into living contact with it. It was at Tuam in Connaught, whither I had gone to learn modern Irish from the late Canon Ulick J. Bourke. There one day in 1871 he presented me with a copy of The Bull ‘Ineffabilis’ in Four Languages (Dublin, 1868), containing the Irish version which he had himself contributed. On the blue cover was a gilt picture of the Virgin, inscribed Sine Labe Concepta. No sooner had I brought it to my lodgings than the woman who looked after the house caught sight of it. She was at once struck with awe and admiration; so I tried to explain to her the nature of the contents of the volume. ‘So the Father has given you that holy book!’ she exclaimed; ‘and you are now a holy man!’ I was astonished at the simple and easy way in which she believed holiness could be transferred from one person or thing to another; and it has always helped me to realize the fact that folklorists have no occasion to invent their people, or to exaggerate the childish features of their minds. They are still with us as real men and real women, and at one time the whole world belonged to them; not to mention that those who may, by a straining of courtesy, be called their leaders of thought, hope speedily to reannex the daring few who are trying to tear asunder the bonds forged for mankind in the obscurity of a distant past. I shall never forget the impression made on my mind by a sermon I heard preached some years later in the cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna. That magnificent edifice in a great centre of German culture was crowded with listeners, who seemed thoroughly to enjoy what they heard, though the chief idea which they were asked to entertain could not possibly be said to rise above the level of the philosophy of the Stone Age.