'Now, the Chevalier was a bold man, and he resolved. if the same thing occurred again, that he would answer the question and say the mass. As the clock struck one, the altar was again lighted, the monk again appeared, and when he once more exclaimed, "Is there any Christian priest here who would say a mass for the repose of my soul?" the Chevalier boldly stepped out of the confessional, and replied in a firm voice, "I will.” He then walked up to the altar, where he found everything prepared for the celebration, and summoning up all his courage, celebrated the sacred rite. At its conclusion the monk spoke as follows: "For one hundred and forty years every night I have asked this question, and until to-night in vain. You have conferred on me an inestimable benefit. There is nothing I would not do for you in return, but there is only one thing in my power, and that is to give you notice when the hour of your own death approaches. The Chevalier heard no more. He fell down in a swoon, and was found the next morning by the Custode, very early, at the foot of the altar. After a while he recovered, and went away. He returned to Venice, where he was then living, and wrote down the circumstances above related, which he also told to several of his intimate friends. He steadily asserted and maintained that he was never wider awake, or more completely in possession of his reasoning faculties than he was that night, until the moment when the monk had done speaking. Three years afterwards he called his friends and took leave of them. They asked him if he was going on a journey. He said, "Yes, and one from which there was no return.' He then told them that the night before, the Monk of Messina had appeared to him and told him that he was to die in three days. His friends laughed at him, and told him, which was true, that he seemed perfectly well. But he persisted in his statements, made every preparation, and on the third day was found dead in his bed. This story was well known to all his friends and contemporaries. Curiously enough, on the Cathedral of Messina being restored a few years after, the skeleton of a monk was found, walled up, in his monk's dress and cowl, in the very place which the Chevalier had always described as the one from which the spectre had appeared.'— The Month, Vol. i. No. XXIX. pp. 455-7. Lady Herbert's party tried to find the niche; but it had been covered by a more recent screen, When all the European countries and even the New World have such striking beliefs in common, there is no supposing that they can all be entirely devoid of foundation. The voice of innocent blood assuredly cries from the ground, and when we look at the remarkable expiation enjoined by the law in cases of untraced murder, as an actual guilt incurred by the very soil of the country, it does seem as if, in spite of the one great expiation, which 'speaketh better things than the blood of Abel,' a stain might still attach to the spot where a victim lies concealed, and thus cause the strange, freakish, sometimes grotesque as well as terrible manifestations that haunt the spot. Nor indeed does there seem to us, considering how absolutely ignorant we are of the spirit world, to be any inherent impossibility that the soul or the phantom shape of one who has done some great wrong should haunt the spot, seeking long in vain for one who should repair the evil. Such is a story-unfortunately without fixed place or date of a Roman Catholic chaplain, who haunted a library, seeking long for some one who would speak to him and hear his story. He had been a careless jovial man, and one day, when just going out hunting had received a letter, which he had reason to think contained a confession, perilous to the interests of many, and unwilling to give up his sport, as he must do if he were known to have had the letter, he hid it away in the library, to be produced at his convenience. Out hunting, he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck, and ever since he had appeared in the room at certain hours of the evening, longing to remove and destroy the dangerous letter, but having no bodily limbs, unable to do it himself, and without power to entreat any still corporeal being to do it for him, until he had first been addressed. In like manner, Souvestte relates, in his Sans Culottes Bas Breton,' a fine Breton legend of a farmer who had stealthily removed his neighbour's landmark' in his lifetime, ever flitting disembodied round the stone, longing to restore it. There is a beautiful class of tales too in which the ghost might seem a manifestation either of the hovering spirit of the departed or of a guardian angel in this shape. Such are the stories of the dead mother who appeared to her children as they were running down an old stone stair in a ruined castle, when a few steps more would have carried them headlong into a gaping vault; of the father, recently deceased, whose still familiar call brought his son away from under a sheltering tree, which the next moment was shattered by lightning, and of the mysterious companion who joined and convoyed a traveller up a lane in which a robber was lurking to attack him. The theory that the wraith or spirit really communicates with the living, according to their power of receptivity, is the pervading one in Mrs. Crowe's Night Side of Nature;' a book in which the arguments are sometimes striking, though the large number of marvels there collected, some on evidence insufficient and others with evidence suppressed, has cast a certain degree of discredit on it. Her quotations do in fact almost establish the possibility that certain appearances in church-yards or over graves, may have a material existence and physical cause, i.e., the escape of gases which make themselves visible in the dark to persons of peculiarly sensitive organizations. In this we fully acquiesce, having ourselves known of a person who beheld a luminous appearance in a church-yard, where her companion could discern nothing. Such appearances it may well be believed would be more visible over the hastily found hiding place of the corpse of one murdered than over a properly made grave, and we thus obtain an almost material means of accounting for such apparitions as those of the Bow-brig sisters, though of course such actions as those of Mrs. Copeland would not thus be explained. There is likewise a strong concurrence of testimony to the spectres that in certain families herald the death of a member of it. The Norsemen of old believed each family to be attended by a certain ancestral spirit, the dis, (pl. disir,) perhaps of the same origin as the lares of Roman households, but though the lar was always in the shape of a dog, as the 'dogs' of open hearths still attest, the dis might be in the form of an animal, each family having its own. Many heraldic bearings might perhaps be accounted for as commemorating the family dis; and possibly too some of those phantom creatures attached to old families, such as the black dog, which was seen by a young mother in Cornwall lying on her sick child's bed. She called her husband to drive it away, he knew too well what it boded, and by the time he had reached the nursery, the child was dead. Another family is said by Mrs. Crowe to be warned by the sight of a single swan upon a lake, and white doves are perhaps the most frequent harbingers-as the fairest. Louis of Thuringia, the crusader, husband of the dear Saint' Elizabeth of Hungary, was summoned by a flight of white doves. The Littelton family are said to have a dove monitor, and in Lancashire the appearance of a white dove at a sick person's window is thought to indicate either a speedy recovery or the presence of a good angel to conduct away the soul. Still, to connect these portents with the disir is far from removing the mystery, but rather heightens it. The human form sometimes belonged to the disir, and is the more common among these heralds of fate. The White Lady attached to the House of Brandenburg is one instance, and so is the Bodach Glas, or Grey Man of whom Scott made such effective use in foreboding the capture of Fergus Mac Ivor. We believe that he is really attached to the Eglinton family, and Mr. Henderson gives an authentic account of his very recent appearance to the late Earl. Scotland and Ireland are chiefly thus visited: the Banshee, or White Spectre, seems to belong to many of the oldest Keltic families in both. No one can forget Lady Fanshawe's account of the Banshee, who so terrified her in the house of Lady Honor O'Brien, without her being aware either of the tradition or that one of the O'Brien family was actually lying in the same house at the point of death. Croker has likewise a most striking story of the Banshee of the Bunworth family. These ghastly monitors are not always connected with individual families, but are sometimes attached to villages and towns always, however, we believe, in those parts of England where the population chiefly came from Scandinavia. It is in Denmark that we find the origin of this belief. It would seem that there has always been a notion that a building required as it were a living sacrifice. We find it in the old Roman legend of the willing leap of Curtius; and Copenhagen is said to have been only founded by the cruel sacrifice of a poor little girl, who was lured into a vault and then walled up. Mr. Atkinson, quoting from Danish authorities, tells us that the workman employed in church-building, used on the day their wall was finished, to seize on any unfortunate animal who came in their way and build it up alive within the wall. Its ghost then became a sort of parish official, called the Kirke-vare or varsel, the church warning, and performed the function of announcing approaching deaths among the parishioners. .... 'So much so, indeed, that in one church or more in the district of Funen, and its outlying islets, it has been the custom, within the present century, to put fresh straw every New Year's Eve into the vaults of the church, to serve as the Kirke Varsel's lair or couch, and when this was done, the bed of the past year was always found to have been reduced to the form of small chafflike particles by the regular use made of it during the past twelve months, as a lair or resting-place. Many churches in the district indicated had their own peculiar Kirke Varsel. Thus, Dalby church had a white goose or gander, at least an entity in that form; Messinge, a black bull or bullock; Drigstrup, a white lamb; Biby, a grey-coloured sheep; Stubberup, two red oxen; Gudberg, a lamb; Gudne, a sow. . . . The belief in the countryside is, or was till very recently, that it was not safe to meet this creature, unless the person encountering it scrupulously kept himself to himself, and diligently held his peace. If he spoke a single word, or chanced to come face to face with the Varsel, in a place where he could not pass without contact with it, he was sure to suffer for it, and possibly be violently hurled to a considerable distance. Sometimes its approach to the doomed house was accompanied by an awful din, as of a lot of iron articles driven in a wheelbarrow over a rough stone pavement; and its arrival, notified, perhaps, by three loud blows on the floor, or by a noise of the windows, as of wings flapping against them, or by a tremendous thundering at the main entrance of the homestead.'-Comparative Folk Lore: Monthly Packet, Vol. xxxix. p. 250. Several instances are then adduced of persons meeting these creatures on their way to houses, where their arrival is invariably followed by a death. It would seem that throughout the north of England, the like appearance was believed in under the name of Barguest, though his existence is not there explained, nor does he seem to have any care taken for his accommodation. Mr. Harland derives the term Barguest from Bar or gate, and ghost; but Mr. Henderson's Bahr geist or Bier ghost seems to us the most satisfactory source proposed for the name. A mastiff, a white rabbit, a pig, a donkey, a horse, or a cow seem to have been the ordinary shapes, but always with large glaring saucer eyes. To roar like a Barguest,' is a popular comparison, and, till very recently, Durham, Newcastle, Burnley, and Whitby believed in their Barguest; nay, in a note, Mr. Atkinson tells us of a sailor at Whitby, lately dead, who believed that a severe swelling in his leg was the effect of meeting an immense shadowy white dog with saucer eyes in a narrow thoroughfare after dark. In Yorkshire, the Barguest is called Padfoot, because of the padding, tramping sound with which it makes its presence known. In Lancashire, it is called Trash, from its splashing along with a sound like that made by old shoes in a miry lane, and Skriker from its wailing cry. Mr. Harland says he has met persons who believed themselves to have seen Trash' in the form of a horse or cow, but he is generally more like a very large dog, with very broad feet, shaggy hair, drooping ears, and the inevitable saucer eyes. On being seen, he walks back wards, growing smaller and smaller, and vanishes either when unwatched for a moment, or in a pool of water with a loud splash. In general, however, these mysterious beings seem to have filed before the schoolmaster, and with them those more attractive beings, the Brownie, the Pixie, the Elf, and the Fay. Nobody of the present generation ever beheld one of these creatures, except perhaps a Spriggan' recently captured in Cornwall and lost, and it took a considerable amount of liquor to enable one of the past, even in Ireland, to discern them. We will not enter on a discussion on the origin of these beliefs, further than to express our dissent from the theory that they were human and remnants of the races conquered by the invaders. It is far more probable that the same primary idea which peopled Greece so gracefully with a nymph for every tree and every wave, developed in the Keltic and Teutonic minds into the Shefro, the Elf, and the Fay, so curiously similar in all genuine traditions. Is it not, indeed, according to all analogy that such spirits may have had power to manifest themselves before the redemption had been fully set forth, and to linger longest in the lands that were the last to become Christian? There may have been the truth of a poet's divination in Milton's lines, inspired by Plutarch's tale of the weeping and wailing in the lonely isle on the night of the Nativity. The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament. From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent, With flower inwoven tresses torn, The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.' Is this poetry and not truth? We know that demoniac possession was never permitted at Jerusalem, and that it prevailed in proportion to the distance of places from where 'Only one border Reflected to the seraph's ken |