CHAPTER X

"I tell ye the story this chill Hallowe'en,For it suiteth the spirit-eve."

Coxe:Hallowe'en.

To induce prophetic dreams the wood-and-watertest was tried in England also.

"Last Hallow Eve I looked my love to see,And tried a spell to call her up to me.With wood and water standing by my sideI dreamed a dream, and saw my own sweet bride."

Gay:Pastorals.

Though Hallowe'en is decidedly a country festival, in the seventeenth century young gentlemen in London chose a Master of the Revels, and held masques and dances with their friends on this night.

In central and southern England the ecclesiastical side of Hallowtide is stressed.

Bread or cake has till recently (1898) been as much a part of Hallowe'en preparations as plum pudding at Christmas. Probably this originated from an autumn baking of bread from the new grain. In Yorkshire each person gets a triangular seed-cake, and the evening is called "cake night."

"Wife, some time this weeke, if the wether hold cleere,An end of wheat-sowing we make for this yeare.Remember you, therefore, though I do it not,The seed-cake, the Pasties, and Furmentie-pot."

Tusser:Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 1580.

Cakes appear also at the vigil of All Souls', the next day. At a gathering they lie in a heap for the guests to take. In return they are supposed to say prayers for the dead.

"A Soule-cake, a Soule-cake; have mercy onall Christen souls for a Soule-cake."

Old Saying.

The poor in Staffordshire and Shropshire went about singing for soul-cakes or money, promising to pray and to spend the alms in masses for the dead. The cakes were called Soul-mass or "somas" cakes.

"Soul! Soul! for a soul-cake;Pray, good mistress, for a soul-cake.One for Peter, two for Paul,Three for them who made us all."

Notes and Queries.

In Dorsetshire Hallowe'en was celebratedby the ringing of bells in memory of the dead. King Henry VIII and later Queen Elizabeth issued commands against this practice.

In Lancashire in the early nineteenth century people used to go about begging for candles to drive away the gatherings of witches. If the lights were kept burning till midnight, no evil influence could remain near.

In Derbyshire, central England, torches of straw were carried about the stacks on All Souls' Eve, not to drive away evil spirits, as in Scotland, but to light souls through Purgatory.

Like the Bretons, the English have the superstition that the dead return on Hallowe'en.

"'Why do you wait at your door, woman,Alone in the night?''I am waiting for one who will come, stranger,To show him a light.He will see me afar on the road,And be glad at the sight.'"'Have you no fear in your heart, woman,To stand there alone?There is comfort for you and kindly contentBeside the hearthstone.'But she answered, 'No rest can I haveTill I welcome my own.'"'Is it far he must travel to-night,This man of your heart?''Strange lands that I know not, and pitiless seasHave kept us apart,And he travels this night to his homeWithout guide, without chart.'"'And has he companions to cheer him?''Aye, many,' she said.'The candles are lighted, the hearthstones are swept,The fires glow red.We shall welcome them out of the night—Our home-coming dead.'"

"'Why do you wait at your door, woman,Alone in the night?''I am waiting for one who will come, stranger,To show him a light.He will see me afar on the road,And be glad at the sight.'

"'Have you no fear in your heart, woman,To stand there alone?There is comfort for you and kindly contentBeside the hearthstone.'But she answered, 'No rest can I haveTill I welcome my own.'

"'Is it far he must travel to-night,This man of your heart?''Strange lands that I know not, and pitiless seasHave kept us apart,And he travels this night to his homeWithout guide, without chart.'

"'And has he companions to cheer him?''Aye, many,' she said.'The candles are lighted, the hearthstones are swept,The fires glow red.We shall welcome them out of the night—Our home-coming dead.'"

Letts:Hallowe'en.

The Witch of the Walnut-Tree.The Witch of the Walnut-Tree.

In Wales the custom of fires persisted from the time of the Druid festival-days longer than in any other place. First sacrifices were burned in them; then instead of being burned to death, the creatures merely passed through the fire; and with the rise of Christianity fire was thought to be a protection against the evil power of the same gods.

Pontypridd, in South Wales, was the Druid religious center of Wales. It is still marked by a stone circle and an altar on a hill. In after years it was believed that the stones were people changed to that form by the power of a witch.

In North Wales the November Eve fire, which each family built in the most prominent place near the house, was called Coel Coeth. Into the dying fire each member of the family threw a white stone marked sothat he could recognize it again. Circling about the fire hand-in-hand they said their prayers and went to bed. In the morning each searched for his stone, and if he could not find it, he believed that he would die within the next twelve months. This is still credited. There is now the custom also of watching the fires till the last spark dies, and instantly rushing down hill, "the devil (or the cutty black sow) take the hindmost." A Cardiganshire proverb says:

"A cutty[1]black sowOn every stile,Spinning and cardingEvery Allhallows' Eve."

[1]Short-tailed.

November Eve was called "Nos-Galan-Gaeof," the night of the winter Calends, that is, the night before the first day of winter. To the Welsh it was New Year's Eve.

Welsh fairy tradition resembles that in the near-by countries. There is an old story of a man who lay down to sleep inside a fairyring, a circle of greener grass where the fairies danced by night. The fairies carried him away and kept him seven years, and after he had been rescued from them he would neither eat nor speak.

In the sea was the Otherworld, a

"Green fairy island reposingIn sunlight and beauty on ocean's calm breast."

Parry:Welsh Melodies.

This was the abode of the Druids, and hence of all supernatural beings, who were

"Something betwixt heaven and hell,Something that neither stood nor fell."

Scott:The Monastery.

As in other countries the fairies or pixies are to be met at crossroads, where happenings, such as funerals, may be witnessed weeks before they really occur.

At the Hallow Eve supper parsnips and cakes are eaten, and nuts and apples roasted. A "puzzling jug" holds the ale. In the rim are three holes that seem merely ornamental.They are connected with the bottom of the jug by pipes through the handle, and the unwitting toper is well drenched unless he is clever enough to see that he must stop up two of the holes, and drink through the third.

Spells are tried in Wales too with apples and nuts. There is ducking and snapping for apples. Nuts are thrown into the fire, denoting prosperity if they blaze brightly, misfortune if they pop, or smoulder and turn black.

"Old Pally threw on a nut. It flickered and then blazed up. Maggee tossed one into the fire. It smouldered and gave no light."Marks:All-Hallows Honeymoon.

"Old Pally threw on a nut. It flickered and then blazed up. Maggee tossed one into the fire. It smouldered and gave no light."

Marks:All-Hallows Honeymoon.

Fate is revealed by the three luggies and the ball of yarn thrown out of the window: Scotch and Irish charms. The leek takes the place of the cabbage in Scotland. Since King Cadwallo decorated his soldiers with leeks for their valor in a battle by a leek-garden, they have been held in high esteem in Wales. Agirl sticks a knife among leeks at Hallowe'en, and walks backward out of the garden. She returns later to find that her future husband has picked up the knife and thrown it into the center of the leek-bed.

Taking two long-stemmed roses, a girl goes to her room in silence. She twines the stems together, naming one for her sweetheart and the other for herself, and thinking this rhyme:

"Twine, twine, and intertwine.Let his love be wholly mine.If his heart be kind and true,Deeper grow his rose's hue."

She can see, by watching closely, her lover's rose grow darker.

The sacred ash figures in one charm. The party of young people seek an even-leaved sprig of ash. The first who finds one calls out "cyniver." If a boy calls out first, the first girl who finds another perfect shoot bears the name of the boy's future wife.

Dancing and singing to the music of theharp close the evening.

Instead of leaving stones in the fire to determine who are to die, people now go to church to see by the light of a candle held in the hand the spirits of those marked for death, or to hear the names called. The wind "blowing over the feet of the corpses" howls about the doors of those who will not be alive next Hallowe'en.

On the Eve of All Souls' Day, twenty-four hours after Hallowe'en, children in eastern Wales go from house to house singing for

"An apple or a pear, a plum or a cherry,Or any good thing to make us merry."

It is a time when charity is given freely to the poor. On this night and the next day, fires are burned, as in England, to light souls through Purgatory, and prayers are made for a good wheat harvest next year by the Welsh, who keep the forms of religion very devoutly.

The Celts had been taught by their priests that the soul is immortal. When the body died the spirit passed instantly into another existence in a country close at hand. We remember that the Otherworld of the British Isles, peopled by the banished Tuatha and all superhuman beings, was either in caves in the earth, as in Ireland, or in an island like the English Avalon. By giving a mortal one of their magic apples to eat, fairies could entice him whither they would, and at last away into their country.

In the Irish story of Nera (q. v.), the corpse of the criminal is the cause of Nera's being lured into the cave. So the dead have the same power as fairies, and live in the same place. On May Eve and November Eve the dead and the fairies hold their revels together and make excursions together. If a young person died, he was said to be called away bythe fairies. The Tuatha may not have been a race of gods, but merely the early Celts, who grew to godlike proportions as the years raised a mound of lore and legends for their pedestal. So they might really be only the dead, and not of superhuman nature.

In the fourth centurya. d., the men of England were hard pressed by the Picts and Scots from the northern border, and were helped in their need by the Teutons. When this tribe saw the fair country of the Britons they decided to hold it for themselves. After they had driven out the northern tribes, in the fifth century, when King Arthur was reigning in Cornwall, they drove out those whose cause they had fought. So the Britons were scattered to the mountains of Wales, to Cornwall, and across the Channel to Armorica, a part of France, which they named Brittany after their home-land. In lower Brittany, out of the zone of French influence, a language something like Welsh or old British is still spoken, and many of the Celtic beliefs were retained more untouched than inBritain, not clear of paganism till the seventeenth century. Here especially did Christianity have to adapt the old belief to her own ends.

Gaul, as we have seen from Cæsar's account, had been one of the chief seats of Druidical belief. The religious center was Carnutes, now Chartrain. The rites of sacrifice survived in the same forms as in the British Isles. In the fields of Deux-Sèvres fires were built of stubble, ferns, leaves, and thorns, and the people danced about them and burned nuts in them. On St. John's Day animals were burned in the fires to secure the cattle from disease. This was continued down into the seventeenth century.

The pagan belief that lasted the longest in Brittany, and is by no means dead yet, was the cult of the dead. Cæsar said that the Celts of Gaul traced their ancestry from the god of death, whom he called Dispater. Now figures of l'Ankou, a skeleton armed with a spear, can be seen in most villages of Brittany. This mindfulness of death was strengthenedby the sight of the prehistoric cairns of stones on hilltops, the ancient altars of the Druids, and dolmens, formed of one flat rock resting like a roof on two others set up on end with a space between them, ancient tombs; and by the Bretons being cut off from the rest of France by the nature of the country, and shut in among the uplands, black and misty in November, and blown over by chill Atlantic winds. Under a seeming dull indifference and melancholy the Bretons conceal a lively imagination, and no place has a greater wealth of legendary literature.

What fairies, dwarfs, pixies, and the like are to the Celts of other places, the spirits of the dead are to the Celts of Brittany. They possess the earth on Christmas, St. John's Day, and All Saints'. In Finistère, that western point of France, there is a saying that on the Eve of All Souls' "there are more dead in every house than sands on the shore." The dead have the power to charm mortals and take them away, and to foretell the future. They must not be spoken of directly,any more than the fairies of the Scottish border, or met with, for fear of evil results.

By the Bretons of the sixth century the near-by island of Britain, which they could just see on clear days, was called the Otherworld. An historian, Procopius, tells how the people nearest Britain were exempted from paying tribute to the Franks, because they were subject to nightly summons to ferry the souls of the dead across in their boats, and deliver them into the hands of the keeper of souls. Farther inland a black bog seemed to be the entrance to an otherworld underground. One location which combined the ideas of an island and a cave was a city buried in the sea. The people imagined they could hear the bells of Ker-Is ringing, and joyous music sounding, for though this was a city of the dead, it resembled the fairy palaces of Ireland, and was ruled by King Grallon and his fair daughter Dahut, who could lure mortals away by her beauty and enchantments.

The approach of winter is believed to drivelike the flocks, the souls of the dead from their cold cheerless graves to the food and warmth of home. This is why November Eve, the night before the first day of winter, was made sacred to them.

"When comes the harvest of the yearBefore the scythe the wheat will fall."

Botrel:Songs of Brittany.

The harvest-time reminded the Bretons of the garnering by that reaper, Death. On November Eve milk is poured on graves, feasts and candles set out on the tables, and fires lighted on the hearths to welcome the spirits of departed kinsfolk and friends.

In France from the twelfth to the fourteenth century stone buildings like lighthouses were erected in cemeteries. They were twenty or thirty feet high, with lanterns on top. On Hallowe'en they were kept burning to safeguard the people from the fear of night-wandering spirits and the dead, so they were called "lanternes des morts."

The cemetery is the social center of theBreton village. It is at once meeting-place, playground, park, and church. The tombs that outline the hills make the place seem one vast cemetery. On All Souls' Eve in the mid-nineteenth century the "procession of tombs" was held. All formed a line and walked about the cemetery, calling the names of those who were dead, as they approached their resting-places. The record was carefully remembered, so that not one should seem to be forgotten.

"We live with our dead," say the Bretons. First on the Eve of All Souls' comes the religious service, "black vespers." The blessedness of death is praised, the sorrows and shortness of life dwelt upon. After a common prayer all go out to the cemetery to pray separately, each by the graves of his kin, or to the "place of bones," where the remains of those long dead are thrown all together in one tomb. They can be seen behind gratings, by the people as they pass, and rows of skulls at the sides of the entrance can be touched. In these tombs are Latin inscriptions meaning:"Remember thou must die," "To-day to me, and to-morrow to thee," and others reminding the reader of his coming death.

From the cemetery the people go to a house or an inn which is the gathering-place for the night, singing or talking loudly on the road to warn the dead who are hastening home, lest they may meet. Reunions of families take place on this night, in the spirit of the Roman feast of the dead, the Feralia, of which Ovid wrote:

"After the visit to the tombs and to the ancestors who are no longer with us, it is pleasant to turn towards the living; after the loss of so many, it is pleasant to behold those who remain of our blood, and to reckon up the generations of our descendants."Fasti.

Fasti.

A toast is drunk to the memory of the departed. The men sit about the fireplace smoking or weaving baskets; the women apart, knitting or spinning by the light of the fire and one candle. The children play with their gifts of apples and nuts. As the hourgrows later, and mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house, and a curtain sways in a draught, the thoughts of the company already centred upon the dead find expression in words, and each has a tale to tell of an adventure with some friend or enemy who has died.

The dead are thought to take up existence where they left it off, working at the same trades, remembering their old debts, likes and dislikes, even wearing the same clothes they wore in life. Most of them stay not in some distant, definite Otherworld, but frequent the scenes of their former life. They never trespass upon daylight, and it is dangerous to meet them at night, because they are very ready to punish any slight to their memory, such as selling their possessions or forgetting the hospitality due them. L'Ankou will come to get a supply of shavings if the coffins are not lined with them to make a softer resting-place for the dead bodies.

The lively Celtic imagination turns the merest coincidence into an encounter with aspirit, and the poetic temperament of the narrators clothes the stories with vividness and mystery. They tell how the presence of a ghost made the midsummer air so cold that even wood did not burn, and of groans and footsteps underground as long as the ghost is displeased with what his relatives are doing.

Just before midnight a bell-man goes about the streets to give warning of the hour when the spirits will arrive.

"They will sit where we sat, and will talk of us as we talked of them: in the gray of the morning only will they go away."Le Braz:Night of the Dead.

"They will sit where we sat, and will talk of us as we talked of them: in the gray of the morning only will they go away."

Le Braz:Night of the Dead.

The supper for the souls is then set out. The poor who live in the mountains have only black corn, milk, and smoked bacon to offer, but it is given freely. Those who can afford it spread on a white cloth dishes of clotted milk, hot pancakes, and mugs of cider.

After all have retired to lie with both eyes shut tight lest they see one of the guests,death-singers make their rounds, chanting under the windows:

"You are comfortably lying in your bed,But with the poor dead it is otherwise;You are stretched softly in your bedWhile the poor souls are wandering abroad."A white sheet and five planks,A bundle of straw beneath the head,Five feet of earth aboveAre all the worldly goods we own."

"You are comfortably lying in your bed,But with the poor dead it is otherwise;You are stretched softly in your bedWhile the poor souls are wandering abroad.

"A white sheet and five planks,A bundle of straw beneath the head,Five feet of earth aboveAre all the worldly goods we own."

Le Braz:Night of the Dead.

The tears of their deserted friends disturb the comfort of the dead, and sometimes they appear to tell those in sorrow that their shrouds are always wet from the tears shed on their graves.

Wakened by the dirge of the death-singers the people rise and pray for the souls of the departed.

Divination has little part in the annals of the evening, but one in Finistère is recorded. Twenty-five new needles are laid in a dish, and named, and water is poured upon them.Those who cross are enemies.

In France is held a typical Continental celebration of All Saints' and All Souls'. On October 31st the children go asking for flowers to decorate the graves, and to adorn the church. At night bells ring to usher in All Saints'. On the day itself the churches are decorated gaily with flowers, candles, and banners, and a special service is held. On the second day of November the light and color give way to black drapings, funeral songs, and prayers.

The Teutons, that race of northern peoples called by the Romans, "barbarians," comprised the Goths and Vandals who lived in Scandinavia, and the Germans who dwelt north of Italy and east of Gaul.

The nature of the northern country was such that the people could not get a living by peaceful agriculture. So it was natural that in the intervals of cattle-tending they should explore the seas all about, and ravage neighboring lands. The Romans and the Gauls experienced this in the centuries just before and after Christ, and England from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Such a life made the Norsemen adventurous, hardy, warlike, independent, and quick of action, while the Celts were by nature more slothful and fond of peaceful social gatherings, though of quicker intellect and wit.

Like the Greeks and Romans, the Teutonshad twelve gods and goddesses, among whom were Odin or Wotan, the king, and his wife Freya, queen of beauty and love. Idun guarded the apples of immortality, which the gods ate to keep them eternally young. The chief difference in Teutonic mythology was the presence of an evil god, Loki. Like Vulcan, Loki was a god of fire, like him, Loki was lame because he had been cast out of heaven. Loki was always plotting against the other gods, as Lucifer, after being banished from Heaven by God, plotted against him and his people, and became Satan, "the enemy."

"Him the Almighty PowerHurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal skyWith hideous ruin and combustion downTo bottomless perdition, there to dwellIn adamantine chains and penal fire,Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms."

Milton:Paradise Lost.

It was this god of evil in Teutonic myth who was responsible for the death of the bright beautiful sun-god, Baldur. Mistletoe was the only thing in the world which hadnot sworn not to harm Baldur. Loki knew this, and gave a twig of mistletoe to Baldur's blind brother, Hodur, and Hodur cast it at Baldur and "unwitting slew" him. Vali, a younger brother of Baldur, avenged him by killing Hodur. Hodur is darkness and Baldur light; they are brothers; the light falls a victim to blind darkness, who reigns until a younger brother, the sun of the next day, rises to slay him in turn.

Below these gods, all nature was peopled with divinities. There were elves of two kinds: black elves, called trolls, who were frost-spirits, and guarded treasure (seeds) in the ground; and white elves, who lived in mid-heaven, and danced on the earth in fairy rings, where a mortal entering died. Will-o'-the-wisps hovered over swamps to mislead travellers, and jack-o'-lanterns, the spirits of murderers, walked the earth near the places of their crimes.

The Otherworlds of the Teutons were Valhalla, the abode of the heroes whom death had found on the battlefield, and Niflheim,"the misty realm," secure from the cold outside, ruled over by Queen Hel. Valkyries, warlike women who rode through the air on swift horses, seized the heroes from the field of slaughter, and took them to the halls of Valhalla, where they enjoyed daily combats, long feasts, and drinking-bouts, music and story-telling.

The sacred tree of the Druids was the oak; that of the Teutonic priests the ash. The flat disk of the earth was believed to be supported by a great ash-tree, Yggdrasil,

"An ash know I standing,Named Yggdrasil,A stately tree sprinkledWith water the purest;Thence come the dewdropsThat fall in the dales;Ever-blooming, it standsO'er the Urdar-fountain."

Völuspa saga.(Blackwelltrans.)

guarded by three fates, Was, Will, and Shall Be. The name of Was means the past, of Will, the power, howbeit small, which menhave over present circumstances, and Shall Be, the future over which man has no control. Vurdh, the name of the latter, gives us the word "weird," which means fate or fateful. The three Weird Sisters inMacbethare seeresses.

Besides the ash, other trees and shrubs were believed to have peculiar powers, which they have kept, with some changes of meaning, to this day. The elder (elves' grave), the hawthorn, and the juniper, were sacred to supernatural powers.

The priests of the Teutons sacrificed prisoners of war in consecrated groves, to Tyr, god of the sword. The victims were not burned alive, as by the Druids, but cut and torn terribly, and their dead bodies burned. From these sacrifices auspices were taken. A man's innocence or guilt was manifested by gods to men through ordeals by fire; walking upon red-hot ploughshares, holding a heated bar of iron, or thrusting the hands into red-hot gauntlets, or into boiling water. If after a certain number of days no burns appearedthe person was declared innocent. If a suspected man, thrown into the water, floated he was guilty; if he sank, he was acquitted.

The rites of the Celts were done in secret, and it was forbidden that they be written down. Those of the Teutons were commemorated in Edda and Saga (poetry and prose).

In the far north the shortness of summer and the length of winter so impressed the people that when they made a story about it they told of a maiden, the Spring, put to sleep, and guarded, along with a hoard of treasure, by a ring of fire. One knight only could break through the flames, awaken her and seize the treasure. He is the returning sun, and the treasure he gets possession of is the wealth of summer vegetation. So there is the story of Brynhild, pricked by the "sleep-thorn" of her father, Wotan, and sleeping until Sigurd wakens her. They marry, but soon Sigurd has to give her up to Gunnar, the relentless winter, and Gunnar cannot rest until he has killed Sigurd, and reigns undisturbed. Grimms' story of Rapunzel,the princess who was shut up by a winter witch, and of Briar-Rose, pricked by a witch's spindle, and sleeping inside a hedge which blooms with spring at the knight's approach, mean likewise the struggle between summer and winter.

The chief festivals of the Teutonic year were held at Midsummer and Midwinter. May-Day, the very beginning of spring, was celebrated by May-ridings, when winter and spring, personified by two warriors, engaged in a combat in which Winter, the fur-clad king of ice and snow, was defeated. It was then that the sacred fire had been kindled, and the sacrificial feast held. Judgments were rendered then.

The summer solstice was marked by bonfires, like those of the Celts on May Eve and Midsummer. They were kindled in an open place or on a hill, and the ceremonies held about them were similar to the Celtic. As late as the eighteenth century these same customs were observed in Iceland.

A May-pole wreathed with magical herbs iserected as the center of the dance in Sweden, and in Norway a child chosen May-bride is followed by a procession as at a real wedding. This is a symbol of the wedding of sun and earth deities in the spring. The May-pole, probably imported from Celtic countries, is used at Midsummer because the spring does not begin in the north before June.

Yule-tide in December celebrated the sun's turning back, and was marked by banquets and gayety. A chief feature of all these feasts was the drinking of toasts to the gods, with vows and prayers.

By the sixth century Christianity had supplanted Druidism in the British Isles. It was the ninth before Christianity made much progress in Scandinavia. After King Olaf had converted his nation, the toasts which had been drunk to the pagan gods were kept in honor of Christian saints; for instance, those to Freya were now drunk to the Virgin Mary or to St. Gertrude.

The "wetting of the sark-sleeve," that custom of Scotland and Ireland, was in itsearliest form a rite to Freya as the northern goddess of love. To secure her aid in a love-affair, a maid would wash in a running stream a piece of fine linen—for Freya was fond of personal adornment—and would hang it before the fire to dry an hour before midnight. At half-past eleven she must turn it, and at twelve her lover's apparition would appear to her, coming in at the half-open door.

"The wind howled through the leafless boughs, and there was every appearance of an early and severe winter, as indeed befell. Long before eleven o'clock all was hushed and quiet within the house, and indeed without (nothing was heard), except the cold wind which howled mournfully in gusts. The house was an old farmhouse, and we sat in the large kitchen with its stone floor, awaiting the first stroke of the eleventh hour. It struck at last, and then all pale and trembling we hung the garment before the fire which we had piled up with wood, and set the door ajar, for that was an essential point. The door was lofty and opened upon the farmyard, through which there was a kind of thoroughfare, very seldom used, it is true, and at each end of it there was a gate by whichwayfarers occasionally passed to shorten the way. There we sat without speaking a word, shivering with cold and fear, listening to the clock which went slowly, tick, tick, and occasionally starting as the door creaked on its hinges, or a half-burnt billet fell upon the hearth. My sister was ghastly white, as white as the garment which was drying before the fire. And now half an hour had elapsed and it was time to turn.... This we did, I and my sister, without saying a word, and then we again sank on our chairs on either side of the fire. I was tired, and as the clock went tick-a-tick, I began to feel myself dozing. I did doze, I believe. All of a sudden I sprang up. The clock was striking one, two, but ere it could give the third chime, mercy upon us! we heard the gate slam to with a tremendous noise....""Well, and what happened then?""Happened! before I could recover myself, my sister had sprung to the door, and both locked and bolted it. The next moment she was in convulsions. I scarcely knew what happened; and yet it appeared to me for a moment that something pressed against the door with a low moaning sound. Whether it was the wind or not, I can't say. I shall never forget thatnight. About two hours later, my father came home. He had been set upon by a highwayman whom he beat off."Borrow:Lavengro.

"Well, and what happened then?"

"Happened! before I could recover myself, my sister had sprung to the door, and both locked and bolted it. The next moment she was in convulsions. I scarcely knew what happened; and yet it appeared to me for a moment that something pressed against the door with a low moaning sound. Whether it was the wind or not, I can't say. I shall never forget thatnight. About two hours later, my father came home. He had been set upon by a highwayman whom he beat off."

Borrow:Lavengro.

Freya and Odin especially had had power over the souls of the dead. When Christianity turned all the old gods into spirits of evil, these two were accused especially of possessing unlawful learning, as having knowledge of the hidden matters of death. This unlawful wisdom is the first accusation that has always been brought against witches. A mirror is often used to contain it. Such are the crystals of the astrologers, and the looking-glasses which on Hallowe'en materialize wishes.

From that time in the Middle Ages when witches were first heard of, it has nearly always been women who were accused. Women for the most part were the priests in the old days: it was a woman to whom Apollo at Delphi breathed his oracles. In all times it has been women who plucked herbs and concocted drinks of healing and refreshment.So it was very easy to imagine that they experimented with poisons and herbs of magic power under the guidance of the now evil gods. If they were so directed, they must go on occasions to consult with their masters. The idea arose of a witches' Sabbath, when women were enabled by evil means to fly away, and adore in secret the gods from whom the rest of the world had turned. There were such meeting-places all over Europe. They had been places of sacrifice, of judgment, or of wells and springs considered holy under the old religion, and whither the gods had now been banished. The most famous was the Blocksberg in the Hartz mountains in Germany.

"Dame Baubo first, to lead the crew!A tough old sow and the mother thereon,Then follow the witches, every one."

Goethe:Faust.(Taylortrans.)

In Norway the mountains above Bergen were a resort, and the Dovrefeld, once the home of the trolls.

"It's easy to slip in here,But outward the Dovre-King's gate opens not."

Ibsen:Peer Gynt. (Archertrans.)

In Italy the witches met under a walnut tree near Benevento; in France, in Puy de Dome; in Spain, near Seville.

In these night-ridings Odin was the leader of a wild hunt. In stormy, blustering autumn weather

"The wonted roar was up among the woods."

Milton:Comus.

Odin rode in pursuit of shadowy deer with the Furious Host behind him. A ghostly huntsman of a later age was Dietrich von Bern, doomed to hunt till the Judgment Day.

Frau Venus in Wagner'sTannhäuserheld her revels in an underground palace in the Horselberg in Thuringia, Germany. This was one of the seats of Holda, the goddess of spring. Venus herself is like the Christian conception of Freya and Hel. She gathers about her a throng of nymphs, sylphs, and those she has lured into the mountain by intoxicatingmusic and promises. "The enchanting sounds enticed only those in whose hearts wild sensuous longings had already taken root." Of these Tannhäuser is one. He has stayed a year, but it seems to him only one day. Already he is tired of the rosy light and eternal music and languor, and longs for the fresh green world of action he once knew. He fears that he has forfeited his soul's salvation by being there at all, but cries,

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