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the farmstead now is ... . Such sites are apt to be very 

 permanent." In spite of the name I was inclined to suppose 

 that those old worshippers must have sometimes delighted to pour 

 their libations on the top of Odinsherg, their sacred mount, 

 though the summit may have been a Holy of Holies to which 

 only the priests might come On January 3rd, 1890, he sent 

 me an article which he had written in a Magazine edited by 

 Mr. Gomme on the subject of horgs, which had been replied to 

 by Mr. Stevenson. He says " More than one of my philological 

 friends — Henry Bradley among them — thought that the ascer- 

 tained and admitted Danish characteristics of the District in 

 which these horgs occur were quite sufficient to establish the 

 Danish, rather than the Anglian, origin of the word. Mr, 

 Stevenson, however, is undoubtedly one of our most scientific, 

 as well as soundest, scholars, and every one of his strictures on 

 Canon Taylor's much quoted book is just as well founded as 

 accurate." This shows how gracefully Atkinson could bow before 

 the judgement of others. When his own further investigation 

 proved that he had previously been wrong he was ever forward 

 to acknowledge his error. Thus he writes in the same letter, 

 " My Butterwick breaks down, inasmuch as I ascertained, beyond 

 question, last spring, that Butterwick was neither more nor 

 less than Butterwhait, for Butterthwaite. And there is a 

 curious piece of inferential history connecting itself with the 

 fact. I have a longish paper nearly half finished dealing with 

 the matter in, I hope, a practical sort of way." 



Atkinson was always ready to help other antiquarian 

 workers. Writing of Canon Greenwell's well-known work, he 

 says: "Yes, I know Greenwell's Barrows. I induced him to 

 print it, and made a fair copy for the printer of more than half 

 of his part of the book. I reviewed it also in ' The Academy.' " 

 On June 20th, 1891, he writes : " I have a note from Baring 

 Gould this morning touching on the question of surviving old 

 ' Songs and Ballads ' in Yorkshire. Have you ever come upon 

 anything of the sort in your part of Cleveland 1 I heard of one 

 last year, which it had been customary to sing on occasion of a 

 wedding in the parish. This was in Glaisdale." Again, in the 

 following December, he writes : " At the request of Dr. 

 Tylor, and the instance of two or three others of my friends, 

 I am endeavouring to procure mementos of the old Cleve- 

 land witchcraft matters and observances ; among other things 

 actual pieces of the ' witchwood ' as worn or carried by people 

 within the last half century, or accurate descriptions of 

 such pieces given by such as have seen them in the use (more 

 or less habitual) or wearing of old folks ; the same, and in both 

 particulars, as to pieces of ' witchwood ' that had been in actual 



