to the character and laws of its small people. A more cogent reason,
however, lies nearer home, in the impenetrable reserve and
self-insulation of the mountaineers themselves. Willkomm confesses that
their coldness towards strangers is unparalleled; they have no
confidence whatever in foreigners; "and let a Lusatian but suspect," he
says, "that you come a-fishing to him, and to listen out his privacies;
then may you," as we may render the Lusatian proverb, "'Lose yourself
before you find his mushroom.'" He will communicate to strangers little
of his manners and customs; of his superstitious practices, his sacredly
guarded traditions, absolutely nothing. "He is unpliant,
self-sequestered, coarse-grained; beyond all conception easy and
phlegmatic."

Every genuine people, however, is rough-handed; and Willkomm proceeds,
after an ingenuous description of their defects, to vindicate the
natural heart of his brother highlanders. "Let him amongst the gentle,"
he proudly exclaims, "who desire to hear for once something novel,
something right vigorous, sit down beside me. He need not fear that
morals and decency will be cast out of doors. No, no! The people are
thoroughly moral and chaste at heart, if they are somewhat coarse in
expression;--ay, and tender withal. Their imagination glides as
delighted along fragrant threads of gold, as it eagerly descends amongst
the powers of darkness, amidst the dance of will-o'-the-wisps and
horrible ghost-reels. They are, at once, a blunt, good-hearted,
aboriginal stamp of men, with all the advantages and deficiencies
appurtenant."

The Lusatian traditions, brought to light in Germany by Ernst Willkomm,
and now first made known to Englishmen in these pages, were collected by
our author, as we have already observed, with difficulty and labour. A
native only of the mountain district could obtain from the lips of the
people their sacred and well-preserved lore, and even he not easily. The
tales were narrated from time to time in the spinning-room, or in the
so-called "_Hell_" of the boor or weaver, without any determinate
connexion. The listener gathered mere fragments, and these not fully,
when, thrown off his guard, he ventured to interrupt the speaker. Each
narrator conceives his tale differently, and one individual is apt to
garnish the experience of many, or what he has heard from others, with a
little spice of his own invention. Further, the details of ten or twelve
occurrences are as