often heard to say that they know generally
beforehand when a criminal will be delivered
to them, because their swords move of their
own accord upon the wall; some even say
that they can foretell by such signs the exact
manner in which a condemned man will be
put to death."

The spontaneous clashing of the headsman's
implements is an idea kindred to the
belief that when an absent knight is killed,
blood breaks out upon the sword that he has
left at home, and many a warrior's wife may
by this superstition have been made to
tremble at the apparition of a few streaks of
red rust.

It was a prettier fancy that prevailed
among the monks of Corbei: the angel of
death laid a lily on the seat of the brother
who would next be taken. Such a monk
would no doubt have been half or quite
frightened to death if any one had put,
secretly through malice, a lily in his chair.
The magnates of the high church of Breslau
translated this fancy—and spoilt it, as
translators do spoil nearly everything: their token
of death was not a lily, but a rose.

Sir Walter Scott has made us all familiar
with White Ladies. The White Lady
superstition was extremely prevalent, but not
before the fifteenth century. It began,
perhaps, with the story of the appearance of
Melusina to the princes of fhe House of
Lusignan. White Ladies appeared before the
death of lords or princes only, or of members
of their family, and often only before those
deaths which were to cause the transfer of
their lands to a new line of heirs. There was
a famous White Lady attached to the House
of Brandenburg. An Italian writer upon
Judas Iscariot told of three great Italian
houses, those of Torelli, Pio, and Gozaga, in
which a White Lady always appeared before
death, and occupied the room in which the
body would afterwards be laid out. It was
believed that this was the apparition of a
former mistress of the house who had been
falsely accused of infidelity, and had therefore
been wrapped up in white linen and thrown
out of an upper window.

As I find that my own flesh begins to creep,
I shall be glad to change the topic. First,
however, let me add a rational explanation
that has been offered of the origin of the
White Lady superstition. White used to be
the colour in which noble ladies mourned.
To say " the White Lady will soon be seen,"
was to say that soon the lord of the house or
one of the family would die. Thence by an
easy corruption, the whole superstition might
in time have come.

Farmers of old time did not grumble at the
weather, but at the neighbour who had raised
the weather. In the early times of the
Romans that was so, and there is a pretty
story on the subject, very familiar to all
readers of Roman history. It will be more to
our purpose to illustrate the strong working
of such a superstitious fancy in much later
times. Here is a story (how suggestive! )
told by Bodimus, in his "Dæmonomania,"
nearly at the end of the sixteenth century.
He had it from the Admiral Coligny, who was
a victim of the massacre of St. Bartholomew:
"A young man, in Poiton, was accused of the
murder of two gentlemen. He confessed that
he had been their servant, and seen how they
strewed powder over the sown fields, with
the words, 'Curse light upon this fruit, upon
this house, upon this neighbourhood.' He
then took the same powder, of which he had
got possession, and threw it into the bedroom
of these nobles, and so it followed that each
of them was found dead in his bed. The
judges thereupon pronounced the young man
guiltless."

There were men who were supposed able
to raise storms, and men able to defend
against them. People who assumed the
latter power were paid by the farmers, just
as payment would now be made to a hail-
insurance office; and "There are many,"
said Archbishop Agobard, of Lyons, very
bitterly,  "many who never pay their tithes
with a good will to the priest, and never give
alms to the widow, the orphan, or to any
other of the poor, however much they may be
exhorted so to do; yet these men will pay
their fees to the storm-preventer with the
utmost punctuality, and without any need of
a reminder."

"Again," said Agobard, "most people are
so foolish and thoughtless as to believe and
declare that there is a land called Magonia,
from which ships come sailing over the clouds
to draw up cargoes of the fruit broken to the
ground by storms or hail, and so take them
home into that land, and they say that the
people of these ships in the air are in alliance
with storm-raisers who, for certain gifts, lift the
fruit up to them." Three men and a woman,
Agobard said, he had himself saved from
being stoned to death in a village to which
they had come as strangers, because it was
believed they had tumbled down in a storm
out of the air ships. Very faint, in comparison
with the idea of society thus given, is even
a humorous exaggeration of our own dark
side of life presented lately to the world by
Mr. Leech. A happy Londoner enjoys the
air in one of our politest mining districts.
Two of the natives eye him, and thus talk
together: "Who's him, Bill?"—"A stranger."
—'Eave 'arf a brick at 'im."

In the sixteenth century, Godelmann
wrote thus:—"In the year fifty-three, two
witches were taken in Berlin, who had agreed
together to make ice and spoil the fruit
season. And these women had stolen a
child from another woman who was their
neighbour, and cut it in pieces to cook it. It
happened, by the will of Heaven, that the
mother seeking her child, came upon them
and saw the little limbs of her lost infant in
the kettle. Then when the women were both