certain air of unromance is given by such a
collection as that we are here considering. The English folk-muse wears
homespun and plods afoot, albeit with a cheerful smile and a steady
gaze.

Some of this effect is produced by the manner in which the tales are
told. The colloquial manner rarely rises to the dignified, and the
essence of the folk-tale manner in English is colloquial. The opening
formulae are varied enough, but none of them has much play of fancy.
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was, though it wasn't in my
time nor in your time nor in any one else's time," is effective enough
for a fairy epoch, and is common, according to Mayhew (_London Labour_.
iii.), among tramps. We have the rhyming formula:

Once upon a time when pigs spoke rhyme,
And monkeys chewed tobacco,
And hens took snuff to make them tough,
And ducks went quack, quack, quack Oh!

on which I have variants not so refined. Some stories start off without
any preliminary formula, or with a simple "Well, there was once a ----".
A Scotch formula reported by Mrs. Balfour runs, "Once on a time when a'
muckle folk were wee and a' lees were true," while Mr. Lang gives us
"There was a king and a queen as mony ane's been, few have we seen and
as few may we see." Endings of stories are even less varied. "So they
married and lived happy ever afterwards," comes from folk-tales, not
from novels. "All went well that didn't go ill," is a somewhat cynical
formula given by Mrs. Balfour, while the Scotch have "they lived happy
and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappie."

In the course of the tale the chief thing to be noticed is the
occurrence of rhymes in the prose narrative, tending to give the
appearance of a _cante-fable_. I have enumerated those occurring in
_English Fairy Tales_ in the notes to _Childe Rowland_ (No. xxi.). In
the present volume, rhyme occurs in Nos. xlvi., xlviii., xlix., lviii.,
lx., lxiii. (see Note), lxiv., lxxiv., lxxxi., lxxxv., while lv., lxix.,
lxxiii., lxxvi., lxxxiii., lxxxiv., are either in verse themselves or
derived from verse versions. Altogether one third of our collection
gives evidence in favour of the _cante-fable_ theory which I adduced in
my notes to _Childe Rowland_. Another point of interest in English
folk-narrative is the repetition of verbs of motion, "So he went along
and went along and went along." Still more curious is a frequent change
of tense from the English present t