Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
Gray cock's feather."
ALLINGHAM.

IT was from a profound knowledge of human nature that Lord Bacon, in
discoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure. "Doth any man doubt," he asks, "that if there were taken out
of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and
imaginations, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor,
shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to
themselves?" This admitted tendency of our nature, this love of the
pleasing intoxication of unveracity, exaggeration, and imagination, may
perhaps account for the high relish which children and nations yet in
the childhood of civilization find in fabulous legends and tales of
wonder. The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to the
same tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses,
which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid. The
gentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night of
his winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with not
unpleasing horror the hearts of the old Norse sea-robbers. What child,
although Anglo-Saxon born, escapes a temporary sojourn in fairy-land?
Who of us does not remember the intense satisfaction of throwing aside
primer and spelling-book for stolen ethnographical studies of dwarfs,
and giants? Even in our own country and time old superstitions and
credulities still cling to life with feline tenacity. Here and there,
oftenest in our fixed, valley-sheltered, inland villages,--slumberous
Rip Van Winkles, unprogressive and seldom visited,--may be found the
same old beliefs in omens, warnings, witchcraft, and supernatural charms
which our ancestors brought with them two centuries ago from Europe.

The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects,"
is still, to some extent, continued in New England. The inimitable
description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may
not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the
following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:--

"The auld gude wife's wheel-hoordet nits
Are round an' round divided;
An' mony lads and lassies' fates
Are there that nig