Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/147

Rh the several sources, but she has hardly carried this sufficiently far. For instance the story of the robin as fire-bringer (p. 110) is given as "a well-known nursery story," in a way that would lead the reader to suppose it is told on Mrs. Trevelyan's own authority, whereas it is a verbatim quotation from Notes and Queries (Choice Notes, p. 184). And, like most "Celtic" writers, she does not always make it clear whether she is speaking of ancient mythology or contemporary folklore.

Nevertheless, the matter is obviously thoroughly authentic and thoroughly Welsh. We see the Welsh type of religious sentiment in the form taken by the usual reluctance to disclose secret beliefs and uncanny stories. Most of Mrs. Trevelyan's informants desired their names to be kept secret "for religious reasons." The scanty population and the characteristic "scattered" type of settlement (as distinguished from the "village" type) appear in the fewness of the social festivals; the melancholy imaginative Celtic temperament in the predominance of spectres and apparitions. Second sight, we are told (p. 191), is nearly as prevalent among the Welsh, especially the South Welsh, as among the Scottish Highlanders, and stories of phantom funerals, wraiths, and corpse-candles abound throughout Wales. In fact, the occurrence or otherwise of phantom funerals may almost be used as a racial test in the Welsh borderland. I never met with them in Shropshire except among the wild ranges of hills along the Welsh boundary.

Another ominous spectre in olden times in Wales was the "death-horse." Sometimes he was white, with eyes emitting blue sparks "like forked lightning"; sometimes black, with eyes "like balls of fire" (p. 182). He came to bear away the parting soul: his coming was quick and stealthy, but his going was with "the wind that blew over the feet of the corpses." The "death-horse" only survives in the memory of a few aged people, but belief in the "corpse-bird" seems to be living and flourishing. This is a small bird of no known species, without feathers and without wings, or with only downy flappers, unable to fly, which sits all day on a bough outside the dying patient's window, uttering a melancholy chirp. "The sound and sight of it," said a villager, "makes one shiver" (p. 182).