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FOLK LORE OF THE BURNLEY VALLEY. 
By ABRAM STANSFIELD. March 8th, 1892. 
In the Literature of Dialects, Lancashire stands pre-eminent. 
Dialect-literature, so called, is spread and read so widely over 
Lancashire, that some have even been led to suppose it the 
peculiar and special product of the county! The use of dialects 
for literary purposes, however, as is well known, is confined 
neither to Lancashire nor to England, though it has probably 
nowhere so extensively prevailed as in this county. Have the 
dialects been used too extensively? With respect to South 
Lancashire that is possible, but as regards the picturesque 
district of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border, there are many 
curious dialects there prevailing, which remain to this day 
almost untouched by the crowd, now a somewhat motley one, 
who dig and mine in these quarries. These dialects make a 
most curious philological study, as the people who speak them, 
themselves, form a subject of unusual interest to the ethnologist. 
A mixed race at the best no doubt we are; but these border 
people, shut up as they have been for long, long centuries in 
remote mountain valleys, without communication with the rest 
of the world, have retained their primitive character to a striking 
extent, while some of their superstitions have remained almost 
as firmly planted as at first. Among these, perhaps, none is so 
fast fixed as the belief in ‘‘ the Evil Eye,” and Virgil, instead of 
writing some 2,000 years back, might have been writing to-day, 
and directly of these people, when in the third eclogue of his 
charming Bucolics, he makes Menalcas say— 
Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos. 
With respect to the prevailing dialects the variety is very great : 
even at the distance of less than a couple of miles, as the crow 
_ flies, you have almost another speech—the difference is 
enormous. Within this distance, e.g., for the verb ‘“ to ask,’ we 
meet with as many as four different forms, viz. : as, ax, spier and 
spurr. In illustration of the curious minor dialectal differences 
which in respect to locality are marked by very sharp lines of 
demarcation, one may observe that the expression, ‘‘ See, yonder 
man!” becomes at Todmorden (just on the county border), 
* Sithee at yond’ felley !’’ while only two or three miles away it 
changes to ‘‘ Sithee at yon’ felley !’”’ the d in the adverb being as 
tenaciously and desperately retained at the one point as it is 
_ persistently cast away at the other. And whilst in the Burnley 
valley the final d in any word has almost invariably the full pro- 
_ longed sound of d, only a short distance away it is just as 
