who at last caused him to fall down a deep
abyss by attempting to cross it on a phantom
bridge that Hattikin erected."

A story of another kind of house-spirit,
may serve as our last reminder of the way in
which the earth was peopled by the
superstitions of our forefathers. The narrator is
Martin Luther; it is from his "Table-talk:"
—"A maid had always a devil sitting by her
on the hearth; it had a little place of its
own, that it kept very clean, as the devil is
always very fond of cleanliness wherever he
may be, in the same way as flies always select
the cleanest things to settle upon, as white
paper for instance. Now the maid one day
begged the Heinzelein, for so she called the
devil, that he would let her see what he was
like, but the Heinzelein would never do so,
until one day the maid went into the cellar,
and she then saw a dead child swimming in a
barrel. Then it was evident what the devil
was, namely Autor cædis, for the maid had
had a child which she had smothered and
hidden in a barrel."

From superstitions of this grosser kind we
turn to the spirits of air, but we shall scarcely
find in the lighter element more graceful
company, if we except the sylphs. The
creatures of air, Paracelsus taught, have
blood and flesh and bone; they speak and eat
and move about; they pass through doors
and walls, but the poor beings have no souls,
and die as worthless as the cattle. The sylphs
of French romance, which appear as guardian
spirits, are descended from the  sylphs of later
Roman times, the Suleviæ or Deæ Suleves,
from whom our word sylph is derived. Thus
a Roman stone was dug up near Lausanne,
with this inscription: "Banira and Doninda,
Dædalus and Tato erected to their Sylphs,
who care for them, this monument." On a
similar stone dug up between Bonn and
Audernach, the inscription was, "To the
Sylphs, Caius Paccius, veteran herdsman of
the twenty-second legion, in fulfilment of his
vow." But Europe in the middle ages thought
itself rather warred against than loved by
the air-spirits; they were seldom seen;
transparent as the medium in which they
floated, they were proud and malicious,
wakeners of storms, destroyers of crops.
Sometimes they represented fighting armies
in the sky; sometimes they were lost spirits
of men, as was the case with the nightingale
in a wood near Basle, that in its own
neighbourhood attracted so much attention in the
sixteenth century. It was at the time when
the Basle Council was sitting, and many
learned men happening to come to and fro,
were astonished at the melting beauty of its
tones. A party of scholars having for some
time halted to listen, one of the company
asked the bird, in the name of the cross, who
he was. Then the bird said that he was the
soul of a wicked man condemned to wait
there till the day of judgment. After that
terrible answer he flew away, but those who
had listened to his song fell sick and died
soon afterwards. The story is told in
Kornmann's "Temple of Nature."

We pass from air to fire, and find spirits of
fire familiar enough in corpse lights, and
Jack-o'lanterns. Here is an idea of the sort
of spirit of fire that can be conjured by
superstition out of a meteor or flash of electric
light. It is a story told of a friend by Jerome
Cardan, the most famous physician of his
day, and a devout believer in all things
supernatural. "One of my friends," he says, "a
trustworthy man, returned from Milan into
Gallarete. It was night, but black clouds
made the night darker, and it was raining
gently. When my friend had just passed by
the churchyard of the next town, and was
about four miles from Gallarete, he perceived
a gradually increasing light, and heard more
and more loudly voices of cowherds from the
left side of him. Soon afterwards he saw
close by him a chariot completely enveloped
in flame; the voices of the cowherds cried
'Beware! beware!' Alarmed by that
apparition, he put spurs to his horse, but
however much he hurried, he saw always the
chariot by his side. He himself in the mean-
time prayed, and at the end of an hour
reached the church of St. Laurence, outside
the town gate. There all seemed to sink into
the earth, chariot, herds, herdsmen, and the
flames."

I may allude here, too, to an English
superstition of the thirteenth century, relating to
an animal called the Grant, a mysterious colt
with sparkling eyes, that jumps about the
streets and sets the dogs barking generally
towards sunset, in any town or village which
is about to be afflicted by a fire.

There were spirits of all waters—fountains,
rivulets, lakes, rivers, and the sea. Once
upon a time, in classic ages, they were graceful
beings, and there is some grace about the
Melusinas and the other ladies of the sea in
whom our forefathers believed. Such damsels
were noted for prophetic power. They uttered
verbal prophecies. They danced upon the
water in which any one was about shortly to
be drowned. Water-spirits were for a long
time retained in worship by the Germans
after they had ceased to be heathens. A
manual for the confessional compiled by
Rhegino in the tenth century, instructs all
priests to inquire "whether any one offers
sacrifice before trees, fountains or stones, as
before altars, or brings to them a light or any
other gift, as if a godhead dwelt there, able to
do to them good or harm."

From the north, terrible shapes were
poured over the waters. There was the ship
Naglfar which was built wholly of dead
men's nails; and there were such water
beings as the enchanter Oller of Sweden, who
sailed about upon a bone; and the pirate
Oddo the Dane, who went about to perform
ocean robbery without any ship at all,
invoking storms which overwhelmed all vessels