Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/153

 Rh character on the English Channel. A rustling rushing sound is heard there on the dark still nights of winter, and is called the Herring Spear or Herring Piece by the fishermen of Dover and Folkestone. This is caused by the flight of those pretty little birds the redwings, as they cross the Channel on their Avay to warmer regions. The fishermen listen to the sound with awe, yet regard it on the whole as an omen of good success with their nets. But they deprecate the cry of the “Seven Whistlers” (named in the sonnet above quoted from Wordsworth), and consider it a death-warning. “I heard ’em one dark night last winter,” said an old Folkestone fisherman. “They come over our heads all of a sudden, singing ‘ewe, ewe,’ and the men in the boat wanted to go back. It came on to rain and blow soon afterwards, and was an awful night, Sir; and sure enough before morning a boat was upset, and seven poor fellows drowned. I know what makes the noise, Sir; its them long-billed curlews, but I never likes to hear them.”

But to return to the Gabriel hounds. In the neighbourhood of Leeds the phenomenon assumes another name and another character. It is there called “Gabble retchet,” and held to be the souls of unbaptized children doomed to flit restlessly around their parents’ abode. Now it is a widespread belief that such children have no rest after death. In North Germany they are said to be turned into the meteors called Will-o’-the-wisp, and so to flit about and hover between heaven and earth. In Scotland, unbaptized infants are supposed to wander in woods and solitudes lamenting their hard fate, and I know that a few years back, at Chudleigh, in Devonshire, a servant in the clergyman’s family asked her mistress whether what the people of the place said was really true, about the souls of unchristened babies wandering in the air till the Judgment Day. And it is very remarkable that German Folk-Lore connects unbaptized infants with the Furious Host or wild hunt, which is evidently the same as the Gabriel hounds of the North and the Wisht hounds of the West of England. The mysterious lady Frau Bertha is ever attended by troops of unbaptized children, and she takes them with her when she joins the wild huntsman, and sweeps with him and his wild pack