things considered; it might have been a
very kind one indeed if he had only made some
round mistake in the arithmetic that balanced
it, years ago. He said, in what he meant
for a re-assuring tone, as they turned down
a narrow road," And this is Pod's End; is
it, Jupe?"

"This is it, sir, and—if you wouldn't mind,
sir—this is the house."

She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a
mean little public house, with dim red
lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if,
for want of custom, it had itself taken to
drinking, and had gone the way all drunkards
go, and was very near the end of it.

"It's only crossing the bar, sir, and up the
stairs, if you wouldn't mind, and waiting
there for a moment till I get a candle. If
you should hear a dog, sir, it's only Merrylegs,
and he only barks."

"Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!" said Mr.
Bounderby, entering last with his metallic
laugh." Pretty well this, for a self-made
man!"

GOBLIN LIFE.

A FEW more pages may be devoted to recalling
some of the many shapes taken by those
superstitions which occupied so prominent a
place among the household words of our
forefathers. It is well for us to think
sometimes of household words now past and gone.
The other day we discussed only the spirits
of the elements, and found how the belief in
them beset the daily life of men with gloom
and terror. But there existed other goblin
fancies.

Even at this day, can we say fairly that
the belief in death omens has gone the way
of all error? The death-watch still sets many a
heart beating, and there are even people who
would resent the imputation of ignorance
unable to hear unmoved at night the howling
of a dog. The dog always was considered a
beast sensitive to impressions from the spirit
world. Eumæan dogs, says Homer, could see
the apparition of Pallas when Telemachus
saw nothing. In the sixteenth century,
Jerome Cardan, the Milanese physician,
relates that a dog howled before his marriage,
and explains that his guardian angel came in
grief to his threshold, and that the dog felt
the presence of the spirit. In the same
century—in the year fifteen hundred and fifty-
three, a few weeks before a great mortality
in Saxony, the dogs, it is said, assembled in a
great troop at Meissen, and ran howling
and yelling dismally through field and forest.

There are still women, and even men,
afraid of corpse-lights. The most elaborate
superstition of this kind, is that which used
to prevail in Wales, through Cardigan,
Caermarthen, and Pembroke. A fire, it was
believed, rose out of the bed of the person who
was about to die; it went thence to the churchyard,
and the way it took was precisely the way
that would be taken by the coffin. If anywhere
it turned aside, the bearers of the coffin would
in the same place be compelled to turn aside
to avoid filth, or some other obstruction.
John Davis, in the year sixteen hundred and
fifty-six, related this belief of his neighbours
in a letter published by Richard Baxter. A
little pale or bluish light, he said, went before
the corpse of an infant or young child, a
thicker one before an adult, and two or
three together preceded as many deaths. A
neighbour of Davis's, about to give birth to a
child, met two such lights at her house-door
as she was entering; they were a large light
and a little one. May we not think it a
direct consequence of the fear attending
superstition, though Davis takes it as a quite
natural sequence, that directly afterwards
this woman fell ill, the child came before
long into the world, and that mother and
child died? Davis's wife's sister, Joanna
Wyat, had been nurse in a great house,
thirty-five years before he wrote his letter,
and then one day, when the lady of the
house lay dead, the housekeeper went into
the maid-servant's room, and saw five of
these lights. Afterwards the room was
whitened, and to hasten the drying, a brasier
of charcoal was put into it. The servants
went to bed, and five of them were dead next
morning.

Philip Camerarius wrote thus of signs of
death: " Some princes are warned by a
roaring of lions, or a strange howling of dogs,
a nightly thumping or stamping about their
castles, or the untimely striking of their
clocks. In monasteries, it happens not
unfrequently that the seats of monks or
nuns, who are about to die, are occupied
by shadows without heads. I know a noble
family that has the surest token of death
when a certain fountain, usually clear, is
clouded by a worm otherwise quite unknown.
Another family of great note is warned of
death by the occurrence of a landslip in their
neighbourhood."

Whoever may be disposed to shudder at
the reading of such things may judge of the
dread excited by the commonest occurrences,
when rich and poor alike were taught thus to
interpret them in solemn earnest.

Lavater wrote, near the end of the sixteenth
century, that when a town councillor or
other public person was about to die, a loud
report, or other token of death, proceeded
from the seat in hall or church habitually
occupied by him. In monasteries he wrote
that monks had heard their coffins being
ordered for them exactly as they were really
ordered not many days after, and he said,
when any one is about to die in the villages,
the people hear, in the dusk of evening or at
night, a sound of spades in the churchyard,
and it is precisely the same sound, stroke for
stroke, that will be made next day by the
sextons. After citing other tokens of the
same kind, he added: "Executioners are