The book is a collection of papers, and the comprehensive title is very misleading. There are a few Harvest customs given in Chapter II., with very good illustrations of harvest knots and rush crosses. Unfortunately Miss Andrews set out to find facts that would fit certain theories that appealed to her fancy, which is not the right way to start either the study or collection of folklore. There is a great deal of unnecessary repetition and extraneous matter in the book, and had Miss Andrews attended to her own dictum—"The pressing need is not to interpret but to collect these old tales," she would have made a better book. It is to be regretted that frequently details are not given instead of the author's theories—for instance, on pp. 19 and 81, where there is reference to things heard but untold. An Ulsterman, to whom the book was lent, summed it up with, "It's true—what there is of it."
We have here an account of the holy wells of London, the principal drinking wells, the olden baths, the medicinal wells and springs, and finally of those springs and wells which attained sufficient notoriety and importance to be denominated "spas." The folklore contained in the work is confined to the chapter on Holy Wells,, pp. 11-26, which gives particulars of no less than twenty-three such wells situated in and near London. One regrets to have to add that the evidence as to the "holiness" of these wells is often slight, and the information meagre; but the book as a whole is a useful addition to the history and topography of Old London. It is carefully and methodically compiled, and incidentally throws light on the social life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The interesting and well-chosen illustrations, most of them copies of old prints, greatly contribute to this end.
