To-day in England curious hints still survive which show that the simple country folk never altogether lost the feeling that these dances were not quite ordinary, but represented some sort of magic charm with which it would be unsafe to interfere. Mr Sidney O. Addy, in his _Household Tales_, says:—“At Curbar, in Derbyshire, it is said that Morris dancing is really fairy dancing, and that ‘Morris dancing’ means ‘fairy dancing.’ Morris dancers of the present day (1895), it is said, go through the same form of dancing that the fairies go through, except that of course they cannot perform such intricate figures as the fairies can. The figures which the Morris dancers of the present day go through are very elaborate and very difficult to learn. A man said to me ‘that Morris dancing had been taken away from the fairies.’ There is something beautiful and strange in the music to which the Morris dancers dance. If ever music was not of this world it is this. To hear it is to believe that Morris dancing was a religious rite.“ The following extract seems to link up our English Morris dance with the Moorish dance, so that whether we choose to derive the word “Morris” from the Keltic Mor-uiseil, or from the Moorish, or whether we think that the similarity of the two words made a confusion in the popular mind, and so the two kinds of dances came to be known by one name, we can still hold the belief that the English traditional dance which has come to us down the ages was originally a religious dance celebrating the return of the Sun-god and the sowing and the gathering of the crops on which man’s life depended.