Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/442

 416 originated in the brain of some shrewd observer of liuman nature. I was familiar in my young days with the story of a person who adopted a similar method of detecting a thief among his servants.

The story is, that a theft had been committed in a gentleman's family, and that no clue could be obtained to indicate the guilty party. He adopted the following method to find out the thief. He placed a cock under a coire (boiler or kettle) turned upside down with a small aperture on its side. He then assembled all his servants together and told them that he had discovered a way of finding out who the thief was. He explained to them what it was, viz. that there was a fierce creature under the boiler which would seize the culprit's hand as soon as he put it through the hole on the boiler's side, but would do no one else the slightest injury. Then each in succession was taken into the room in which the boiler was placed with its "unearthly" occupant. Those who were innocent had no hesitation in thrusting in their hand through the small aperture, and the creature inside indicated that they did so by a slight movement. When, however, the culprit had to go through the ordeal he showed such trepidation and fear that he could not muster courage to do as the rest had done, and so unmistakably spotted himself as the thief.

A few years ago I was asked to annotate a MS. of Orcadian old customs by an Edinburgh antiquarian friend. I was not a little surprised to find the above legend among them almost word for word. It was also remarkable that it was used there as a method of detecting theft.

Amongst my father's servants at Rhayader (of which parish, and the adjoining one of Cwmtoyddwr, he was vicar for twenty-three years) was an old man of the name of Thomas Savage. He had been in early life a shepherd; and he had a large stock of stories, which were the delight of my early childhood. Amongst the rest he used to tell how he once formed one of a party who, in the dead of night on the hill to the north of Rhayader, were