Correspondence. 305
town. I have listened to them for hours telling long stories of a type like those of the "Arabian Nights" or the "Bagh-o-Bahar," about Rajas and Shahzadis, fairies and demons. But such tales are seldom worth much. They are of too literary a type ; many of them, it is true, are good traditional stories, of which most of the incidents are genuine folklore, but these are worked up again and again in a myriad fresh combinations according to the fancy of the narrator.
Next I turned for assistance to a native Christian clerk in my own office, who, of course, knew the vernacular Hindustani, but little or no English. In selecting such aid as this it is essential that the recorder should know no tales in a literary form; if he does he may make up " Cinderellas " and " Ali Babas " by the yard. This man had the excellent quality of being too great a fool and possessed of too little imagination to render it possible for him to do much harm. He got me a number of tales from an old cook- woman who officiated in the Mission Compound. She was by way of being a Christian, but I fancy that her belief was little more than skin deep. At any rate she had not reached the stage of despising " pagan " beliefs and traditions.
After a while I discovered by sheer accident that one of my own orderlies was a mine of stories. This I learned by casually hearing him holding forth to my other servants one night round the camp fire. When I asked him about tales he was quite ready to help, only venturing to express a mild degree of wonder that a " Sahib " should interest himself in such things. But then " you never know what strange thing a Sahib may do." He of course knew Sahibs and their ways, had no nervousness or shyness, and knew that he could come to no harm by telling any tales he knew. He could neither read nor write, so I had to get a native clerk to sit beside us and take down what he said word for word. My orderly seemed to regard this as a sort of semi-legal process, and it was amusing to see how anxious he was to have his " deposition " read over, and how careful he w^as to see that the record was drawn up correctly.
Later, again, when I came in contact with the wild hill people of Mirzapur, I found the difficulty of communicating directly with these ignorant and timid tribes almost insurmountable. But I was fortunate enough to find a village accountant who knew their particular kind of Hindi, and who having lived for years among
VOL. XIII. X
