Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/302

 294 a friendly greeting, thinking it was a wayfarer, but saw, to his amazement, that the light came from a lantern held by a hand only. He was one of the "common-sense people", who scouted the supernatural and would not believe the evidence of his eyes, so he struck with his stick at the light, and was instantly hurled with terrible force to the ground, where he lay for a time senseless; on coming to himself he could not find his way, and only reached his home after midnight. So in Wales, anyone rashly interfering with or attempting to stop a corpse-candle was struck down and stunned. It is ill jesting with these appearances.

In the extreme south of India the Shānārs, a very numerous caste of devil-worshippers, believe that waste places, and especially burial-grounds, are haunted by demons that assume various shapes, one after another, as often as the eye of the observer turns away, and are often seen gliding over marshy land like flickering lights. They are called in Tamil pey-neruppu, i.e., devil-fires. Riding late after dark over a jungly tract near mountains I once saw what the natives with me averred was a pey-neruppu; it seemed a ball of pale flame, the size of an orange, moving in a fitful wavering way above the bushes and passing out of sight behind trees; its movements resembled the flight of an insect, but I know of none in India that shows any such light; the fire-flies there are no larger than fire-flies in Italy. The Rev. Baring Gould, however, expresses the opinion that all beliefs and stories about Will-o'-the-wisps arose from the flight of luminous insects. It may, however, be remarked that Drayton and the old poets, who often refer to Will-o'-the-wisps in days when they seem to have been commoner than now, put them in the hands of a mischievous sprite, such as Puck or Friar Rush, once the device of the Folk-Lore Journal—