hat empire is made or deserved, and if with
the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling
much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and
forgotten, we who have, by the fortune of training, been allowed to see
the beauty of the old things must recognize that what the generation
gains is more for its happiness than what it discards, as a new brass
Birmingham bedstead is cleaner, healthier, and more desirable for a
small crowded cottage than a worm-eaten old wooden four-poster.

This reminder I make to myself more than to any "gentle reader"; for I
have a passionate attachment to antiquity and a curiosity in legend
which leads me into remote paths of speculation and fancy. Some of the
most interesting survivals of ancient tradition are those customs, far
more common all over England than is supposed, which contain some very
ancient religious rite, long ago forgotten by the people, who practise
as a superstition, or sometimes as a pastime, what was once an act of
worship. The Christian Church, indeed, embodies many of these
survivals of paganism, not in its dogma or liturgy, but in its customs.
Such, for instance, is the giving of eggs at Easter, the eating of hot
cross buns on Good Friday, the games of All Hallowe'en, the harvest
festival.

Such customs as "touching with a dead hand" as a cure for sickness,
covering the mirrors in a house where one has just died, watching at
the church door on Midsummer Night to see the souls of all the
worshippers pass in, and those who will not live out the year remain
behind and do not pass out--these are part of the common stock of
beliefs, not confined to Devonshire or Scotland, nor directly traceable
to Celt or Saxon or Latin, but surviving from the remote past of the
human race, when the slowly emerging mind was struggling with its
apprehensions of life and death. But there are other customs,
surviving in the wilder and less accessible parts of our country, in
Scotland, Northumberland, Devon, and Cornwall, which seem to throw a
flash of light on the history of vanished peoples, by their
resemblance--though worn and rubbed by time, like a defaced coin--to
certain rites, well known to us in history, as practised by the Romans,
or the Druid peoples, or the worshippers of Baal.

Of such kind is a ceremony, until a few years ago very common in
Devonshire, where the first armful of corn that is cut is bound into a
little sheaf, called "the