Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/289

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The late Canon Humble once told me how a friend of his was startled during a midnight walk from Hilton to Sunderland on a dark night after an evening spent in conversation about the Cauld Lad. In the loneliest part of the road a blast was blown into the traveller’s face, not icy, indeed, but very warm. He leaped into the middle of the road, and his first impulse was to fly, but curiosity got the better of fear, and going back he found a cow with her head thrust into the path through a gap in the hedge.

Mrs. Murray, a lady born and brought up in the Borders, tells me of another Cauld Lad, of whom she heard in her childhood, during a visit to Gilsland, in Cumberland. He perished from cold, at the behest of some cruel uncle or stepdame; and ever after his ghost haunted the family, coming shivering to their bedsides before any one was stricken by illness, his teeth audibly chattering; and, if it were to be fatal, he laid his icy hand upon the part which would be the seat of disease, saying,

From Mr. Baring-Gould I learn of “a Radiant Boy, a spirit quite sui generis;” a boy with shining face, who has been seen in certain houses in Lincolnshire and elsewhere, but who was described more in detail by an old Yorkshire farmer bearing the nickname of John Mealyface. The account given by him to Mr. Baring-Gould runs thus: “John M. was riding one night to Thirsk, when he suddenly saw pass him a Radiant Boy on a white horse. There was no sound of footfall as he drew nigh. Old John was first aware of the approach of the mysterious rider by seeing the shadow of himself and his horse flung before him on the high road. Thinking there might be a carriage with lamps, he was not alarmed till by the shortening of the shadow he knew that the light must be near him, and then he was surprised to hear no sound. He thereupon turned in his saddle,