the
terrible answer of the pagan. And what are we to say to it? Is it that
the struggle itself has lasted all these centuries, or only its
memory? My belief is that the struggle itself has lasted in reality
though not in name.

But if we have been able to look through the very portals of
Christianity to the regions of paganism behind, can we not boldly pass
through altogether and recover from folklore much of the lost evidence
of our prehistoric ancestors? I put the question in this way
purposely, because it is the way which is indicated by the methods and
data of folklore, and it is a question which has much to do with the
different views held of the province of folklore.

I will answer by referring to the pre-baptismal rites of washing. In
Northumberland we meet with the analogue of the sixteenth-century
Irish practice, for there the child's right hand is left unwashed that
it may gather riches better[448]--the golden coin taking the place of
the ancient weapon in this as in other phases of civilisation. Not
only is the water used for this purpose heated in the old-fashioned
way by placing red-hot irons in it (_i.e._ the modern equivalent for
stone-boiling), but in Yorkshire we have the custom that the newborn
infant must be placed in the arms of a maiden before any one else
touches it, two practices represented exactly in the customs of the
Canary Islanders, who were in the stone age of culture and are
considered to be the last remnants of a race which once included
Britain among its lands of occupation.[449]

The Rev. C. O'Connor, in his third letter of Columbanus, gives a very
interesting statement of Irish well-worship in a letter addressed to
his brother, the late Owen O'Connor Don, and which shows the living
antagonism between Christian and pagan belief. He says:--

"I have often enquired of your tenants what they
themselves thought of their pilgrimage to their wells
of Kill Orcht, Tobbar-Brighde, Tobbar-Muire, near
Elphin, and Moore, near Castlereagh, where multitudes
assemble annually to celebrate what they, in broken
English, termed Patterns; and when I pressed a very
old man--Owen Hester--to state what possible advantage
he expected to derive from the singular custom of
frequenting in particular such wells as were
contiguous to an old blasted oak, or an upright unhewn
stone, and what the meaning was of the yet more
singular custo