Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/357

Rh the same superstitions having been rife ages before the birth of the lady to whom they have now been applied.

“In many points Madame Gould strongly resembles the German Dame Holle: such as her connection with water and her silver comb, as well as the appearance to the apple-picker. Holle or Holdar, in Germany, is a very beautiful white lady with long flowing hair of a golden hue; she haunts fountains and streams, and is often engaged in washing. She is well disposed, and rebukes bad children, punishing theft and other faults. Her dress is white with a golden girdle, and she is radiant with light. She is an ancient Teutonic goddess. Curiously enough, also, she lives in mountains, and issues luminous from the mouth of caves, just as Madame Gould appeared to the man from the old mine-shaft. In one account of the apparition which I obtained, Madame Gould was expressly said to have appeared with golden hair; whereas her portrait represents her as a very beautiful woman, with long brown hair floating down her back.

“I have given these stories of the old Madame with some fulness because I believe her to be unquestionably an ancient Saxon goddess, who has fallen from her pedestal, and undergone anthropomorphosis and localization; and such instances, though not uncommon in Norway or Germany, are rare in England.”

Devonshire is no doubt a land of ghost stories. I remember how racily some of them were told by the late Rev. William Woollcombe, an aged clergyman of that county with whose family my own is connected. One was of a young lady in North Devon, whose father had been carried off by smugglers, kept a prisoner for a “year and a day,” and only released on payment of a large sum of money. He did not long survive his restoration to his home, and his daughter, an only child and motherless, soon followed him to the grave, worn out by that year of loneliness and suspense. But she did not rest there; her spirit haunted the neighbouring town, a straggling fishing-place, whose inhabitants were supposed to be implicated in the abduction of her father. Her mode of punishing them was peculiar. She would flit from house to house on Sunday morning while the dinners were cooking, and, laying her cold hand on the meat, would