Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/305

 Rh upon its head. It passed near the tree in which he was watching, when such a thrill of dread came over him, and his hands and limbs shook so, that he could not level his p^un, even if he had had the nerve. Such was the tale the old man told me with many asseverations; in all his life he had never had such an experience.

Some of the wandering tribes in India, much resembling gipsies, of whom, indeed, they are probably the original stock, have another theory as to Will-o'-the-wisps. They have a curious dislike to blowing out or suddenly extinguishing a flame without previously lighting another at it, and so continuing its life. They have an idea that a flame or fire, abruptly cut off and extinguished is, in a manner, murdered, and becomes a ghost, wandering in the shape of a flickering light over waste grounds and marshes. An officer on a shooting expedition in the Malabar forests told me that coming across a camp of Lambârdies, a gipsy clan, he pitched his tent near them, and thinking they would know where big game would be found, sent for two of them to his tent. When they arrived he was engaged in sealing several letters, etc., at a lamp on his table, and when he had finished, blew it out, whereupon the two Lambârdies, abruptly turning, left the tent without ceremony, and hastily departed. The officer was much surprised at this behaviour and want of respect, and subsequently learnt that on his blowing out the lamp they were afraid lest the ghost of the flame should haunt and affect them injuriously.

Although Will-o'-the-wisps seem now to have left Britain, along with their kinsfolk the fairies, for in these days when ghosts and spooks are so zealously looked up, no instances of them are ever heard of, it is remarkable that amongst another race and in another land "Wispy Will" appears yet to live and flourish, but to have changed his mischievous frolicksome habits for a malignant vampire-hke disposition. In her very curious volume. Old Rabbit the Voodoo, Miss Mary A. Owen has reproduced at length the