A Folk - Tale Through the agency of friends, notably the Clerk
of the Evcsham R.D.C., and by personal contacts with the people, I once collected what I think must be one of the most remarkable hordes of rural folk-tales in Britain. I give one of them here, partly because it came from a• Campden land-labourer, partly because it is the very soul of brevity and partly because it packs into the utmost economy a whole range of qualities and feelings—irony,. compassion, simplicity, pungency of expression, humour, pictorial precision and a vein of the purest poetry that in its traditional forms has vanished for ever from our country- side:— " There might be some unkid [there the meaning is dreary 1 parsons about, and farmers be a gatlus [sly and absorbed in their own interests] lot mostly, but doctors be proper men. Folks about here respecks and trustes 'em, and rightly so it be. Poor old Daniel was mortal bad ; and there lay he, white as a cloud and calm and still as a pool in summer time. 'Dear old chap ! I'm afraid he's gone,'
says the doctor. No, I bent then,' cherruped old Daniel. Bent indeed!' sez his old 'ooman. You bide quiet. Doctor knows best.'"
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