It is not always easy or even possible to trace the precise pedigree of a popular superstition or custom, but many of them can be identified as fragments of bygone religious and mythological systems. When an old faith is supplanted by a new, the missionaries, as a matter of tact, will leave untouched customs that are harmless, and will turn to better uses those that can safely be modified or appropriated. Thus much of folk-lore is fossil theology, and much of it is fossil science. The wonderful “cures,” and sometimes disgusting remedies that linger in use among the ignorant, were the recognised methods of the healing art a few generations ago. Folk-lore, in some respect, corresponds to that wonderful faculty of “make-believe” possessed by all children, and is an inheritance from the mental childhood of the race. The physical evils, the mental and moral discordances of life, are to primitive man not the result of the operation of natural law, but abnormal phenomena, the result of external non-human agencies. Disease is not regarded as the result of infractions of hygienic rules, but as the possession of the sufferer by evil spirits. When man looked around for an explanation of the facts of nature, he found it by peopling the world with unseen beings, who guarded the trees and the wells; who let loose the storm and chained up the winds; who had the good and the evil gifts of human nature; who helped and hindered; who cheated and were cheated. These imaginary beings are sometimes merely the distortion and personification of words. It is not every great language that has attained to the dignity of a neuter gender, though our own possesses one. Personification is a common enough rhetorical device. It is possible, then, that if we could accurately analyse the notions of a modern Lancashire mind, we should find in addition to the deliberately-held faith of conviction fragments of the mythologies of Greece and Rome and Scandinavia and India. In regard to popular traditions and the household stories, so dear to children, they have come to us by many routes, but the line has always been from East to West. The Buddhist missionaries, going forth to preach the faith of Gautama, made abundant use of fables and apologues to enforce their lessons. The traders, as their caravans passed from land to land, beguiled the tedium of the journey with such narratives. The mediæval preachers freely employed them in their discourses to the unlearned people. If such a phrase be permitted, these tales formed the unwritten popular literature of the Middle Ages. The stories passed from mouth to mouth, and were gradually associated with the place and people best known to the narrator. In this way legends become localised.