Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/398

 368 by the fatal stile hour after hour through the cold winter's night, till, as he said, "it come to five o'clock, and he hadna seed nothin', and he doubted as if his brother 'ad a bin comin' e'd a come afore that, and he doubted as he'd best go whoam;" and I never heard that he "essayed the adventure" a second time.

Another story from the same parish of Norbury has already been told in my Shropshire Folk-Lore, but that book is known to so few, that, as the story really belongs to Staffordshire, I shall make no apology for repeating it here. A short distance from the village there is a bridge over the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal which is always regarded as rather an uncanny place at night. A labouring man who had to cross this bridge with a horse and cart about ten o'clock one evening in January, 1879, arrived at home in an extraordinary state of fright and agitation, and related that just as he passed the bridge a black thing with white eyes sprang out of the hedgerow on to his horse. The terrified horse broke into a gallop; the man tried to knock off the creature with his whip, but the whip went through the Thing and fell from his hand to the ground. How he got rid of the intruder or reached home at last he hardly knew, but the whip was picked up the next day just where he said he had dropped it. The story of his strange encounter quickly spread, and this was the explanation that was offered by a local wiseacre: "It was the Man-Monkey as always does come again on the Big Bridge, ever since the man was drowned in the 'Cut.'"

To turn to the subject of Magic: may I give you the views of an old man in the same locality, as expressed by himself to my eldest brother, who made notes of the conversation at the time? Some neighbours of "Owd Stock'on's" had been turned out of their house by the mortgagees. "Niver see sich a thing i' my life," he said; "their things wun all turned out i' the middle o' the road. Eh! I should na like to a bin them as did it. I should be