Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/288

 266 dissuade him from his purpose, while the maid added, “And its Peg ’o Nell’s night, and she has not had her life.” The traveller laughed and set off, but neither horse nor rider reached the opposite bank.

The stone image is probably that of some saint brought from either Whalley or Salley Abbey, neither of which are very far off.

The counties of Northumberland and Durham are certainly peculiarly rich in tricksy sprites. There is the Cauld Lad of Hilton, who haunted Hilton Castle in the Valley of the Wear. Seldom seen, he was heard night after night by the servants. If they left the kitchen in order, he would amuse himself by hurling everything widely about; if they left it in confusion, he would arrange everything with the greatest care. Harmless as he seemed, the servants got tired of him; so they laid a green cloak and hood before the kitchen fire, and set themselves to watch the result. At midnight the “Cauld Lad” glided in, surveyed the garments, put them on, frisked about, and, when the cock crew, disappeared, saying:

All this bespeaks him a sprite of the Brownie type; still he is in the neighbourhood deemed the ghost of a servant-boy, slain by an old baron of Hilton in a moment of passion. The baron had ordered his horse to be ready at a certain time, but waited for it in vain, so he went to the stable, found the lad asleep, and struck him a blow with a hay-fork, which killed him. The baron, it is added, covered the victim with straw till night, and then threw him into a pond, where indeed the skeleton of a boy was discovered years afterwards. Some verses, said to be sung by the Cauld Lad at dead of night, certainly accord well with the notion of his being a ghost: