understood; let
the girl be married by her father's hearth, and under her father's
roof."[84] And in another story of the "Chundun Rajah" we have "the
scattering rice and flowers upon their heads;"[85] the significance of
both of which customs are fully known.

These illustrations of the contact, the necessary contact, of
tradition and history show that contact to be equally true of the
folk-tale as it is of the local or personal legend. They all point to
the substratum of fact underlying tradition, to the absorption by
tradition of many features of the life by which it is surrounded, or
to the absorption by some great historic person or event of the living
tradition of his time or place. This contact is a fact equally
important to history and to folklore. It cannot be neglected by
either. It stands for something in the analysis which every student
must give of the material with which he is working, and that something
has a value, sometimes great and sometimes small, which must influence
the estimate of the material which both history and folklore supply in
the unravelling of man's past.

I will now finally give a more complicated example of the folk-tale as
illustrative of the connection between history and tradition. Mr.
J. F. Campbell printed a tale in the second volume of the
_Transactions of the Ethnological Society_ (p. 336), which had been
sent to him in Gaelic by John Davan, in December, 1862--that is, after
the publication of the fourth volume of his _Highland Tales_. The tale
is only in outline, but in quite sufficient fulness for my present
purpose, as follows:--

There was a man at some time or other who was well off, and had many
children. When the family grew up the man gave a well-stocked farm to
each of his children. When the man was old his wife died, and he
divided all that he had amongst his children, and lived with them,
turn about, in their houses. The sons and daughters got tired of him
and ungrateful, and tried to get rid of him when he came to stay with
them. At last an old friend found him sitting tearful by the wayside,
and learning the cause of his distress, took him home; there he gave
him a bowl of gold and a lesson which the old man learned and acted.
When all the ungrateful sons and daughters had gone to a preaching,
the old man went to a green knoll where his grandchildren were at
play, and pretending to hide, he turned up a flat hearthstone in an
old stance,[86] and went out of sigh