Our investigation of barbarous and savage customs, which connect themselves with the essential incidents of this Highland tale, has at this point taken us outside the framework of the story. The old father in the tale was not killed by the mallet, but he is said to have used it as a warning to others to stop the practice of giving up their property during lifetime. We have already seen that this practice was an actual custom in early times, appearing in local survivals both in England and Scotland. Therefore the story must have arisen at a time when this practice was undergoing a change. We must note, too, that the whole story leads up to the finding of a mallet with the rhyming inscription written thereon, connecting it with the instrument of death to the aged, but only on certain conditions. If, then, we can find that the rhyming inscription on the mallet has an existence quite apart from the story, and if we can find that mallets bearing such an inscription do actually exist, we may fairly conclude that the story, which, in Scotland, is the vehicle of transmission of the rhyme, is of later origin than the rhyme itself. First of all, it is to be noted under this head that Wright, in a note to the Latin story we have already quoted, gives from John of Bromyard's _Summa Predicantium_ another English version of the verse-- "Wit this betel the smieth And alle the worle thit wite That thevt the ungunde alle thing, And goht him selve a beggyng," which shows, I think, the popularity of the verse in the vernacular. Clearly, then, the Latin version is a translation of this, and not _vice versâ_. It must have been a rhyming formula in the vernacular, which had a life of its own quite outside its adoption into literature. This inferential proof of the actual life of the English rhyming formula is confirmed by actual facts in the case of the corresponding German formula. Nork, in the volume I have already quoted, collects evidence from Grimm, Haupt, and others, which proves that sometimes in front of a house, as at Osnabrück, and sometimes at the city gate, as in several of the cities of Silesia and Saxony, there hangs a mallet with this inscription:-- "Wer den kindern gibt das Brod Und selber dabei leidet Noth Den schlagt mit dieser keule todt"-- which Mr. Thoms has Englished thus:-- "Who to his children gives his bread And thereby himself suffers need, With this mallet strike him dead."[105]