When visiting a strange place with the set purpose of personal collecting, the best way of beginning is, perhaps, to get the parish clerk or sexton (if such a person is to be found) to show the church, and then to draw him out on bell-ringing and burying customs, and to obtain from him the names of the “oldest inhabitants” for further inquiry. Failing the sexton, the village innkeeper might be a good starting-point. Then a visit may be paid to the school in the mid-day “recess”, and the children may be bribed to play all the games they know for the instruction of the visitor. Possibly some bits of local legend may be gleaned from them as a foundation for further inquiries. These inquiries will often be quite as successful on some points if pursued among the oldest families in the place, as among the oldest inhabitants of the place. Old household or family customs are best preserved in solitary farmhouses, especially if tenanted by the same family for several generations. But it is a mistake to think that a very remote and thinly populated parish will necessarily yield more folklore of all kinds than another. A scanty stay-at-home population does not preserve legends well, and has not esprit de corps sufficient for the celebration of public customs. A large village, or a market-town quite in the country, is generally the best place to find these; and the “lowest of the people”—the chimney-sweepers, brick-makers, besom-makers, hawkers, tinkers, and other trades in which work is irregular—are those who keep up old games, songs, dances, and dramatic performances.
Most villages have their doctress, generally an intelligent old woman, who, nevertheless, mixes something of superstition with her remedies. But in the counties with which I am best acquainted, fortune-telling, divination, and sorcery generally, flourish chiefly in the low parts of large towns, where their professors acquire a wide reputation and are resorted to from considerable distances.
Superstitious opinions, though they flourish most, of
