of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, how
different it would be from the same book as it
is furnished to us in the nineteenth century
by Mr. Vaux.

The two preceding tales are both superstitions
fastened upon ancient objects by the
men who wondered at them. We will take
next a story of a cavern, and of a discovery
which the people of Basle believed to have
been made in their neighbourhood, in the
year fifteen hundred and twenty. An old
heathen goddess, under the name of Lady
Venus, survived as an earth spirit in the
middle ages; she was supposed to live under
the earth, and to entertain knights now and
then. It does not seem, however, to have
been Lady Venus herself of whom this story
is told in Stumpr's Swiss Chronicle:—

"In the year of our Lord fifteen hundred
and twenty, there was a man at Basle in
Switzerland, Leonard by name, commonly
called Lienimannus, the son of a tailor, a crazy,
simple mortal, who could speak but ill,
because he stammered. This man, since he had,
by I know not what means, made his way
into an underground passage or cavern that
there is at Augst, near Basle, and gone into it
farther than any man had gone before him,
was able to tell a very strange tale." One
sees so far the credibility of this. Few mountain
regions are without stories of the
wonderful ramblings and explorations of the idiots
who go where others fear to tread, and there
is no reason to doubt that the tailor's son
told a strange tale—a compound of old legends
—about the cavern; the remarkable and
instructive part of the case is, that his story
was, at once believed. He said that "he went
down, taking a consecrated waxlight, and
came first to an iron gate, afterwards from
one cavern to another, until at last he passed
through some beautiful green gardens, in the
middle of which there was a fine palace. In
the palace was a lovely lady, woman to
her middle, but below that a dreadful snake.
The lady led him by the hand to two chests,
upon which two black dogs were baying. The
lady, however, having silenced them, took a
bunch of keys which she had hanging round
her neck, opened the chest and took out of it
all kinds of gold, silver, and other coins. With
great kindness the lady gave him not a few of
these, which he took away with him, and
displayed, so that any one might see them. He
testified also that the lady used to say, she
was born of royal race, but so cursed and
enchanted that she had been changed into such
a monster, and had no hope of restoration
until some youth, pure as a boy, and with as
whole a heart, should kiss her three times.
Then she would recover her true shape, and
give to her deliverer the whole of the treasure
that was kept hidden in that place. He
said also that he had kissed the lady twice,
and each time she had made such terrible
gestures expressive of her joy, that he had
thought she would devour him, and had fled.
He would have gone the third time, but
before he went he had been made acquainted
with a young maiden of Basle, and his heart
ceased to be whole. After that, he could
never again find the entrance to the cave."
"Who will not believe," says the chronicler,
"that all this is the pure cheating of a demon.
There exist the old Roman coins which the
young man fetched out, and which he has
shown to many of our citizens, and he has
given such accounts as make it certain that
in the said cavern under the ground there is
a famous treasure, which an earth-spirit (such
spirits are often called Telchinnes) possesses
and guards. That nobody may take this for
an invention or fable, there are still living
witnesses who have received the whole from
the lips of the said Lienimannus." A citizen of
Basle, after this, went into the cave for hope
of getting treasure, but when he had gone a
little way and found upon the floor some
human bones, he was seized with so great a
fear that he turned round at once and rushed
out again as fast as he was able.

Capital food for superstition was found by
our fathers in the bone caves, but I turn aside
from them, and go into the mines, caves
worked by the industry of men themselves,
places of daily business. They too, as all the
world knows, were supposed to be inhabited
by earth-spirits, whose business it also was to
work wherever there was metal. Some of
these spirits were invented by designing
traders, that, for example, was the origin of
Rübezahl, famous to English readers by the
name of Number Nip. Emperor Rudolf the
Second caused precious stones to be sought
for throughout Bohemia, and gave special
powers to a priest of Rowensko, a little town
not many miles from Turnau, to look for
jewels in the Riesengebirge. The stone-
cutters who then chiefly belonged to Italy
meant to secure to themselves that region
famous for its possibilities of wealth, and sent
thither one of their factors, who, by trickery
and goblin-making, frightened away all the
good Silesians, and he it was who probably
gave rise to the comparatively modern
legends about Rübezahl or Number Nip.

Paracelsus, in his book upon occult philosophy,
says that the earth-spirits, watching
over treasures and rich veins of metal, have
flesh and blood like men, with a peculiar kind of
reason, but no soul. Another learned
expounder of the subject, Peter Thyræus, in a
work on the Apparitions of Spirits, says that
the creatures are as Paracelsus describes them,
and that they are not to be regarded quite as
spirits, but as forming a middle substance
between men and brutes. Lavater, writing
upon apparitions in the year fifteen hundred
and eighty, spoke in detail of the ghosts and
spirits that are to be seen in mines, dressed
like the miners, and apparently at work like
them, yet producing nothing out of all their
show of digging, loading, dragging. They do
no harm to the workmen if they are not