Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/154

 132 across the wintry sky. In North Devon the local name is “Yeth hounds,” heath and heathen being both “Yeth” in the North Devon dialect. Unbaptized infants are there buried in a part of the churchyard set apart for the purpose called “Chrycimers,” i. e. Christianless hill, and the belief seems to be that their spirits, having no admittance into Paradise, unite in a pack of “Heathen” or “Yeth” hounds, and hunt the Evil one, to whom they ascribe their unhappy condition.

Mr. Baring-Gould heard of this hunt in Iceland from his guide, Jón, under the name of the Yule host; and in his Iceland, its Scenes and Sagas, pp. 199-203, he gives so lucid an account of the myth that I am thankful, by his kind permission and that of his publishers, Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co., to insert it in these pages. My readers will observe that he lays all the rout to the charge of the wind, not of the bean-geese; and certainly a winter wind would account for any amount of confusion and turmoil, especially on the wild moors and hills of the North. Still I do think that some of the wild stories and superstitions point to the birds in question as their originators, at least in part:—

“Odin, or Wodin, is the wild huntsman who nightly tears on his white horse over the German and Norwegian forests and moor-sweeps, with his legion of hellhounds. Some luckless woodcutter, on a still night, is returning through the pinewoods; the air is sweet-scented with matchless pine fragrance. Overhead the sky is covered with grey vapour, but a mist is on all the land; not a sound among the fir-tops; and the man starts at the click of a falling cone. Suddenly his ear catches a distant wail: a moan rolls through the interlacing branches: nearer and nearer comes the sound. There is the winding of a long horn waxing louder and louder, the baying of hounds, the rattle of hoofs and paws on the pine-tree tops. A blast of wind rolls along, the firs bend as withes, and the woodcutter sees the wild huntsman and his rout reeling by in frantic haste.

“The wild huntsman chases the wood spirits, and he is to be seen at cockcrow, returning with the little Dryads hanging to his saddlebow by their yellow locks. This chase goes by