Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/67

Rh entered, bearing her husband’s lifeless body. He had died suddenly, by a fall from his cart.”

The presages of death on the Border are very numerous, e.g. the sound of bells in the night, the chirping of crickets, lights of circular form seen in the air, when there is no fire or candle, the dead chack or death-watch, a call by night or day in the voice of some absent person, a gripe of the arm or leg by an invisible clay-cold hand, the howling of dogs before your house-door, hens bringing off a brood all hen-birds, or laying eggs with double yolks, the birth of lambs deformed or with superfluous limbs, the chirping of fish long after they have been taken out of the water, sounds as though the house were falling down, magpies flying round the house or preceding you on the way to church, ravens croaking on or near it, swords falling out of their scabbards all these are tokens of approaching death; but the most fatal of all is for a man to see his own wraith walking to or from him at noon or before sunset.

Compare with the third of these death omens, “lights of a circular form seen in the air,” the following account from Sussex: “They believe in that county that the death of sick persons is shown by the prognostic of ‘shell-fire.’ This is a sort of lambent flame, which seems to rise from the bodies of those who are ill, and to envelop the bed. A distant connexion of mine asserts that she saw this phenomenon in the case of two of her sisters who died of typhus fever, and gives, in attestation, the remark of one of the sufferers herself, who asked what the light was.”

In Lancashire it is believed that to build, or even to rebuild, a house, is always fatal to some member of the family—generally to the one who may chiefly have advised or wished for the building or alteration. But to return to the most fatal of Border portents.