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So much space has been filled with the Great Hare that I can only indicate in so many words other gifts of anthropology to mythology in addition to the theory of totemism.

(2) It will be probably acknowledged in no long time that the kind of stories which the advanced (Greek and Indian) religions tell about anthropomorphic gods and heroes are in almost every one of the lower races told about theriomorphic or beast-shaped gods and heroes. As civilisation advances feather and fur drop off, the bestial heads are removed from the divine images, and gods are made in the image of man.

(3) Many myths now explained by Aryan etymologies will be found current all over the globe, among peoples who never spoke an Aryan tongue. In Custom and Myth, and in my introduction to Mrs. Hunt's translation of Grimm's Household Tales, I try to show this in the case of the myths of Cronus, of Cupid and Psyche, and of the Argonautic expedition. The essential ideas in all these are familiar to Samoans, Ojibbeways, Maoris, and appear to be in one case rude nature-myths; in others, relics of very early customs; in others, purely romantic inventions. I might add the myth of Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. Kuhn and many others explain that Pramantha, the fire-stick, is the original of the name Prometheus. The Aryan word for rubbing became confused with the word for stealing, and Pramantha (Prometheus) the Fire-Rubber became the Fire-Robber. To this 32 I reply by showing that, all the world over, peoples who do not speak an Aryan language, Maoris, Australians, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs, possess the myth of the Fire-Stealer. They cannot have obtained it through forgetfulness of the meaning of an Aryan root. Their fire-stealing persons, too, following the law already mentioned (2), are almost always beasts or birds, or anthropomorphic heroes who have assumed a bestial shape for the occasion.

Many other examples of the results of the anthropological, or ethnopsychological, or agriological, or Hottentotic method might be given. I must be content with these for the present, and with the conclusion that, when Greeks or Indians were in the same tale' with Maoris and Cahrocs, they inherited the legend from savage ancestors, or borrowed it from savages, or from people who retained survivals of savagery; they did not hit on it in the delirium produced by a disease of language.'

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ANDREW LANG.

an edition different from that which lies before me (Holt: New York, 1876). I give the references as they occur in that volume.

32

Encyclop. Britann. s.v. 'Prometheus,' where a different hypothesis as to the meaning of the story of stealing fire is hazarded.

VOL. XIX.-No. 107.

F

THE LITTLE ONES AND THE LAND.

AWHILE ago I paid a call on Mrs. Grimbley. She is a very poor widow, and how she lives none know but herself; yet she does continue to live where her father lived before her, and his father before him. She is a strange old woman. She is descended from an old Huguenot family; they were thriving people once; she is the last of her line. I found her cowering over a wretched fire that could hardly keep alight, and she was reading a gaudy tract given her by some apostle of the Rights of Man; it advocated the restoration to the people of what belonged to the people, to wit the land. Mrs. Grimbley was reading her tract in the great chimney corner, and she was holding over her head a large umbrella to protect her against the rain; the miserable hovel was full of smoke; the fire was sputtering with the big rain drops that came down the vast chimney steadily, heavily. I closed the door and sat down upon a three-legged chair (a genuine Queen Anne), and I attempted conversation somewhat timidly, for I saw that Widow Grimbley was not in the mood for talk. At such times I avoid the use of pronouns as much as possible and shrink from preaching or anything like it. Then the following dialogue ensued, question and answer following one another with long intervals of silence.

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'Can't say as I am; I don't like it anyhow, but I've got to bear it. It's the law.'

'Law's a rum un, eh?'

'Ah! and a bad un, or some of us wouldn't be clothed in purple and fine linen and some of us have to sit under an umbrella.'

'Rain comes down here seemingly when some winds blow.' 'Some winds? It don't stop coming down for winds. Ah! There now! you've found it out too!

This à propos of a big blob of soot that fell upon my hand, brought down by the pelting rain.

'Grand old chimney though to look at, eh? I verily believe, Mrs. Grimbley, that if I had a rampant horse with vaulting ambi

tion enough I could drive a gig up that chimney. Would you come? I'd take you with me.'

This was too much for Mrs. Grimbley; she shuddered silently. At last she could not restrain her sense of the ludicrous. Poor old soul, she used to know what laughter was once ever so long ago— and she tried not to laugh and tried to keep it back now, ashamed of the weak phantom of merriment that had surprised her.

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'I ain't no call to laugh,' she said, and then she dried her eyes. The old chimney, I've heard my grandfather say, was a very old one ever since he could remember. It belonged to him and it don't belong to me, and if it did I shouldn't be none the better. There ain't no room in this world now for the Little ones. That's the law!'

Poor Dolly Grimbley-her father had christened her Dorotheaif I betrayed her into laughter she almost startled me into tears, for the pathos of the scene touched me profoundly-the dreary and desolate old woman without a relative in the world, desperately resisting the horrible thought of ending her days in the Union, and slowly starving herself to keep out of the abhorred Bastile; she, in her forlorn condition, going for comfort to the Rights of Man and the dream of the spoliation of the haves for the benefit of the havenots; bitter at heart, so bitter that the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief seemed to her to have gone over to the strong and to have no further care for the weak and weeping and all the suffering and wronged Little ones.

But it was Mrs. Grimbley who taught me that term, and I find it a convenient one which saves me much circumlocution at times, when I want to discuss one of the burning questions of the day with those who know something about it.

In Arcady to lump our children together under one designation which assumes that they are all of a size may often lead to your giving dire offence. To insinuate that the baby yonder is only an average baby will quickly bring upon you the maternal protest, 'Lor, sir! we du reckon him a big buoy!' We are matter-of-fact people in Arcady, and we stickle for the meaning of words, especially where the status of our progeny is involved. How's your wife, Simon?' said I to a young father once. 'She's getting on bonny, sir!' And the baby? Is it a nice little baby?' 'Well, sir, we think as it ain't a very nasty one.' No reproof was meant ; it was only a cautious and modest way of putting it without conceding too much either way. Knowing this wary habit of mind, which the inexperienced would mistake for captiousness, we rarely speak of children as the little ones, because there are big children. and little children, but some of us have consented to describe the smaller occupiers of land as the 'little folk,' or as Mrs. Grimbley did by naming them the Little ones.

In Arcady we include among the Little ones all holders of land

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under a hundred acres, though at the one end there are sure to be some who are on the verge of pauperism, and at the other there are those who are thriving men of substance with a credit balance at the bank; for it is rather the size of his holding than the length of his purse which settles the question of what class a man belongs to among So too we reckon among the Little ones only the occupier of the land, whether he be owner or tenant; and as the smaller the occupation the higher the rent, it is obvious that we shall have to deal with a class which embraces people in widely different circumstances, from the semi-pauper, who is hanging on to his five acres and homestead by his eyelids and paying his rent with his pig, up to the yeoman, who has no rent to pay and is chary of letting anyone shoot a hare upon his land or walk across his meadow without leave.

Among this large class of small owners and occupiers of land in East Anglia are to be found the very bone and marrow, the very heart and life blood, the moral fibre, and the hope of our agricultural population. During more than twenty years' absence from country life I had become entangled in all those baseless theories which dapper townsfolk adopt with such a ready acquiescence, and which are based upon the wonderful assumption that everything small must needs be mean; as if every short man were a retrogressive savage and every game cock were only a degraded eagle. I am quite prepared to admit that my neighbour's cat is a dwarf tiger and ought to be slain, but to make war upon smallness of size as if it were ipso facto an indication of a stunted brain and low morale, the unmistakable sign and evidence of moral and intellectual deficiency, that is to enter upon a queer sort of campaign, in which not always the weakest, at any rate not always the tiniest, will go to the wall. I had heard so much during my sojourn in the City of the waste of small farming, I had become so carried away by the flood of tall talk which had gone on for more than a generation assuring us that high farming was the one thing needful for the prosperity of the country generally and of the agricultural interest particularly; the results of scientific agriculture had been blazed abroad with such resonant pæans and double choruses of brag, that when, six years ago, I bade farewell to the streets and all the walking encyclopædias who haunt the printing offices and shed the light of their omniscience upon mankind, I was quite prepared to bow down to the idols of the hour; and indeed I was firmly convinced, because I had been told, that a small farmer stood in the same relation to a large farmer as a donkey on a common does to a racehorse at Newmarket: the latter was a noble animal, the former was an ass.

Six years of going in and out among the peasantry in Arcady; six years of vigilant observation, of somewhat intrusive questioning, of that subtle sympathy which comes of friendly feeling and honest desire to be in touch with one's neighbours in their bitter vexation or their chuckling glee, in their grief or their wrath-six years have

been quite enough to scatter my cut and dried theories to the winds. I have learnt to believe more and more in the Little ones, because with us in Arcady they seem to me the only people likely to be left to us to believe in, if agricultural matters go on much longer as they have been going for some time past.

Two great men who have been in the foremost rank of great men in my time have each been credited with a very remarkable speech. Mr. Disraeli, when he was Mr. Disraeli, is reported to have said that he would jump into a quart bottle if such a thing could be found, and Mr. Mechi is reported to have promised that he would grow a turnip upon his dining-room table if only it would pay. In the one case given the time and the quart bottle could have been produced without difficulty, but then Mr. Disraeli could not have jumped into it. In the other case given the time and it would have been satisfactorily proved that the growing of the turnip could not pay.

Our philosophers of the new school are much more audacious and peremptory than the astute statesman and the experimental agriculturist; they are for omitting the if and substituting for it the imperative mood. They say, let there be quart bottles and let there be turnips; men shall then jump into the first and profit shall come from growing the last. Oh, ye peremptory people, what a pity it is that the wheels of God go on grinding in despite of you-grinding slowly but exceeding small!

How is it that there are always some subjects that people seem to think anybody can be conversant with without having learnt anything about them? Some of us remember the homoeopathy craze, when demure spinsters went about with a handbook of diseases and a leather case furnished with little phials full of globules and were for ever prescribing for us. The poor creatures lived to reform the science of medicine; they had a mission. Bless their dear old hearts! it did them good and nobody else much harm. As long as only ladies of a certain age and of limited incomes preach in their own small circles their crisp little gospels of medicine or morals, nobody need care what folly they proclaim; but when men of a certain sort of ability, men of utterance and vehement passion, and whose gifts command a hearing, come forward with political nostrums which they are prepared to force down the throats of the community with the knob sticks of the mob, a bad time may be coming for the wise. The gout may be very hard to bear, but for pity's sake save us from your sherry.

I have started by saying I love the Little ones. It would seem to me to be a serious evil if the numbers of those who live by the land in a small way should diminish, and there are those, and many of them the ablest and the most far-sighted, who agree with me so far. Two sets of reformers are engaged upon the problem how to increase the number of the Little ones. The one set attack it from the bottom, the other from the top. The one say, Level down the large farmers;

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