XI 

 A HARVEST OF IRISH FOLK-LORE 



SINCE the days when Castren made his arduous 

 journeys of linguistic exploration in Siberia, or 

 when the brothers Grimm collected their rich trea- 

 sures of folk-lore from the lips of German pea- 

 sants, an active quest of vocables and myths has 

 been conducted with much zeal and energy in nearly 

 all parts of the world. We have tales, proverbs, 

 fragments of verse, superstitious beliefs and usages, 

 from Greenland, from the southern Pacific, from 

 the mountaineers of Thibet and the f reedmen upon 

 Georgia plantations. We follow astute Reynard 

 to the land of the Hottentots, and find the ubiqui- 

 tous Jack planting his beanstalk among the Dog- 

 Rib Indians. At the same time, the nooks and 

 corners of Europe have been ransacked with boun- 

 tiful results ; so that whereas our grandfathers, in 

 speculating about the opinions and mental habits 

 of people in low stages of culture, were dealing 

 with a subject about which they knew almost no- 

 thing, on the other hand, our chief difficulty to-day 



