scription (speaking broadly) with a la dies' cabin and everything handsome about her. But even with this unusual accommodation the human story would seem to have refused to settle down in her. "Identification by finger-prints is pretty new," murmurs (we imagine) another intending scribe; “we'll have a secret surgery to which criminals shall resort to have their thumbs skinned." But to this attractive establishment when set up, as it presently is on paper, nothing like human life as we know it ever came. Slang of course is always fairly fresh-continually renewing its youth: to make a lavish use of the very latest on every page, not in the dialogue to give point to character but when speaking in their own proper persons, appears to be regarded by several writers as bestowing that cachet of modernity upon their works which must be got somehow. Even where the backbone of the story resembles some fossil melodrama from the south bank of the Thames, the lugger of the abductor lying hove-to in the offing will have become a motor-yacht. The writers we have in mind all show this haste, this frenzied rush to get level with the passing hour, though it be but with a catchword; and meanwhile the immutable facts, of life which should be their study remain unobserved. They have not even time to know the details of their mise-en-scène. The stage and the studios are perennial subjects of interest to outsiders, and are therefore much in favor as backgrounds: it asks, one would think, but little trouble to find out what these safe cards are really like superficially at all events. Yet we find descriptions of theatres where the footlights are on the wrong side of the curtain and the prompter on the wrong side of the stage; and through the introduction of a woman novelist of course-we recently made the acquaintance of an undraped model who until she moved The Saturday Review.

could not be distinguished from a marble statue even by another woman in the same room.

All this points to hurried output, a lack of preliminary study and a total disregard for the dignity and responsibility, as we understand it, of the story-teller's rôle. We should have no objection to any number of people mak ing public exhibitions of ineptitudeindeed, it would be their business and not ours-if the reputation of a branch of humane letters were not involved. It is probably useless to ask any of these estimable people but inept writers to think more and to write less. Writing shares with acting a false appearance of extreme easiness. Most other arts are protected by a rather conspicuous chevaux-de-frise of initial technicalities. But any young person who is sound in wind and limb and who can more or less subdue a Cockney accent may spend fully six years in the discovery of her inability to represent anything whatever except her engaging self. Similarly anybody, young or old, who can put pen to paper-and unfortunately we most of us can-may shut themselves up in a room for an even longer period before finding out that after all he or she really had nothing to say. Meantime we suppose they will go on saying it—in print, at six shillings a volume-unless it can in some way be brought home to them that nobody marks them.

And so we too must appeal to the People. Let the Boffins of this country be more on their guard as to the credentials of their literary acquaintance. We are afraid it is the Boffins who are largely to blame for the quantity and the quality of this torrent of fiction. Let them resolve to be more circumspect to read far less fiction without a warranty beforehand. Let them turn over a new leaf-only onethis year.

It is a curious and suggestive fact that the general diffusion of scientific knowledge, so far from destroying superstition, has actually enlarged its area of influence. Nothing could appear at first sight to be more antagonistic to the fostering of a credulous belief in the intervention of supernatural agencies in human affairs than the vast collections of our National Museum and the solicitude of its guardians for their widest possible publicity. And yet we have lately seen, in the very penetralia of that Temple of Science, crowds hurrying past the painted lid of a mummy-case, and scarcely daring to give it a side glance, terrified by tales of a malign ka hovering invisibly in its vicinity. Within a few minutes' walk of the museum, again, we find Mr. Stead busily running "Julia's Bureau," and imparting to the newspaper reader departed statesmen's views of current politics. The procedure at this bureau seems to be based on an amalgam of the spirit-rapping manifestations of the last half-century and the more sober investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, founded by the late F. W. Myers.

I do not question the good faith or the scientific spirit in which the lastnamed Society's researches have been conducted. On recently reading, however, Sir Oliver Lodge's quotations of the curiously incoherent communications alleged to have come from its departed founder, I was at once reminded of the famous "Vision" in Tucker's Light of Nature, wherein are described the difficulties besetting a disembodied spirit's efforts to convey its thoughts and wishes to others. Now when we consider the literary and scholarly atmosphere in which the cultured mediums of the Society have lived and moved, it is not to be doubted that

some of them at least would be familiar with Tucker's vision, either in the voluminous original work or in Hazlitt's more readable abridgment. If that supposition be correct, there would be no difficulty in assigning a perfectly natural source to these broken messages, in the sub-conscious reminiscences of the mediums themselves, entirely independent of any exterior intelligence whatsoever. So far, then, we do not seem to have advanced one step in the direction of a scientific necromancy beyond what we are told in Homer's Odyssey or Scripture narrative.

But not to become lost in the mazes of mythology that such allusions as these would allure us to, I must leave the spectral Teacide at Salumis, and the Great Twin Brethren, to whom the Dorians pray, at Lake Regillus, and confine myself to Western Europe and the ethnological problems so closely intertwined with its superstitions. Southey's version of the Chronicles of the Cid happens to be on my desk. Near the end of the chronicle I come upon this tale: "For the night before the battle was fought at the Navas de Tolosa, in the dead of the night, a mighty sound was heard in the whole city of Leon, as if it were the tramp of a great army passing through. And it passed on to the Royal Monastery of St. Isidro, and there was a great knocking at the gate thereof, and they called to the priest who was keeping vigils in the church, and told him that the captains of the army whom he heard were the Cid Ruydiaz and Count Ferman Gonzalez, and that they came there to call up King Don Ferrando the Great, who lay buried in that church, that he might go with them to deliver Spain. And on the morrow that great battle of the Navas de Tolosa was fought, wherein sixty thou

sand of the misbelievers were slain, which was one of the greatest and noblest battles ever won over the Moors." A few lines further on are quoted the verses which Alfonso the Wise ordered to be graven on the stone coffin in which he had enclosed the Cid's remains, where the Campeador's name is coupled with vivax Arthurus gloria Britannis. Phantom riders are still believed to traverse the north-western uplands of Spain. In the Asturias and Galicia, where fogs are as prevalent as in the south-western parts of our own island, and where the wreaths and wisps of mist are whirled along by the wind in fantastic forms, troops of ghostly caballeros may be seen at the dead of night making their way to the various cemeteries, with lights in their unearthly hands. These apparitions are known as esteadas, a term the exact meaning of which I do not know, but conjecture to be the same as that of estadal, "a fathom of wax taper."

That

Although spectral processions are not unknown even in the Home Counties, as, for example, on the ancient road that winds its devious grass-grown way along the Chilterns, where on moonlit nights favored eyes have beheld unearthly hosts slowly ascending the slope towards Whiteleaf Cross, it is in South Wales that we find the closest parallel to the Galician esteadas. is the "corpse-candle" superstition, commonly but erroneously supposed to be prevalent throughout the Principality. Strictly speaking it is confined to the diocese of St. Davids, and the phenomenon-not the belief in it-is assigned as a miracle to the saint himself. It is thus correctly described in The New English Dictionary: "A lambent flame seen in a churchyard, or over a grave, and superstitiously believed to appear as an omen of death or to indicate the route of a coming funeral." A peculiar variation of this belief is found near Glyn Cuch, which was the scene of the

meeting between Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and Arawn, King of Hades. A short story will illustrate this form of the superstition: "A woman was one day working in a potato-field, and happening to look towards a neighboring hill-slope she saw a funeral ascending it. She called to the housewife and told her what she was gazing at. 'No, there's no funeral there,' was the reply. 'Yes, there is,' persisted the other, 'Soand-so has a red flannel shawl on, and So-and-so is wearing a white one.' And she could recognize nearly all the people in that procession. Within a week a funeral passed along that road, and the people the woman had seen and described were all there." The name by which this daylight apparition is known in that district is Y Teulu ("The Family," or "Household"); and, as the reader has no doubt perceived, the vision itself is analogous to the "second sight" of the Scottish Highlands.

From the celebrity of the writers whose attention has been at various times attracted to this weird Highland superstition, and whose pens may be said to have buried it under a profusion of literary flowers rather than to have really illustrated it, I think it highly probable, indeed almost certain, that a great many totally independent beliefs have been classed together as instances of "second sight." But the Southwalian "Household" of daytime cannot be separated from the nocturnal "corpse candle." The latter is often really, if invisibly, attended by a procession. The wayfarer, as he sees the portentous light advancing, is elbowed by unseen powers out of the roadway into the ditch, as happened once to an old acquaintance of my own, who, though not a total abstainer, was generally believed by his neighbors to be telling the truth when he gave this explanation of his being found asleep by the roadside on his way home from

market.

As has been already mentioned, this belief is not native to North Wales, and we have to travel north till we cross the Scottish Border before we come upon it again. In Scott's Ayrshire Tragedy mention is made of the corpselight dancing on the waves near the sea-beach at Girvan, in the direction of the murdered Quentin Blane's body; but that instance, perhaps, is not very convincing. But there are writers connected with the south-west of Scotland who had a more intimate first-hand knowledge of the peasantry and their beliefs than Sir Walter had. The Ettrick Shepherd, for example, writing in Allan Cunningham's Anniversary for 1829, gives us the following: "There came a man to the door, and with a The Outlook.

loud yell of dismay burst it open, and staggered forward, crying, "There is a corse-candle in Crake's Moss, and I'll be a dead man before the morning. Delusions and exhalations! Dame Johnstone, d'ye think I dinna ken a corse-light from an elf-candle, an elf-candle from a will-o'-wisp, and a will-o'-wisp from all other lights of this wide world?" (Cameronian Preacher's Tale).

Here we are assuredly within the peculiar spectral province which we have already glanced at in South Wales and Galicia; and a closer scrutiny than there is room for in this article would probably bring out still more striking resemblances.

J. P. O.