All that I am anxious to prove, all that it is possible to prove, from these considerations of the position occupied by myth, is that myths constitute a part of the serious life of the people. They belong to the men and women, perhaps some of them to the men only and others to the women only, but essentially to the life of the people. I do not think that even Mr. Hartland in his special study of the subject has quite understood this. He begins at a later period in the history of tradition, the period of story-telling proper, when myths have become folk-tales,[208] and he treats this period as the earliest instead of the secondary stage of myth. In this stage something has happened to push myth back from the centre of the people's life to a lesser position--a new religious influence, a new civilisation, a new home, any one of the many influences, or any combination of influences, which have affected peoples and sent them along the paths of evolution and progress. It is in this way that we come upon the folk-tale. The folk-tale is secondary to the myth. It is the primitive myth dislodged from its primitive place. It has become a part of the life of the people, independently of its primary form and object and in a different sense. The mythic or historic fact has been obscured, or has been displaced from the life of the people. But the myth lives on through the affections of the people for the traditions of their older life. They love to tell the story which their ancestors revered as myth even though it has lost its oldest and most impressive significance. The artistic setting of it, born of the years through which it has lived, fashioned by the minds which have handed it down and embellished it through the generations, has helped its life. It has become the fairy tale or the nursery tale. It is told to grown-up people, not as belief but as what was once believed; it is told to children, not to men; to lovers of romance, not to worshippers of the unknown; it is told by mothers and nurses, not by philosophers or priestesses; in the gathering ground of home life, or in the nursery, not in the hushed sanctity of a great wonder.[209]