Lord Mayor, resuming the argument with his
looking-glass, after a short pause of pride in
his illustrious circle of acquaintance, which
caused him to swell considerably, "it comes
to this. Do these various distinguished
persons come into the city annually; as a matter
of course, to make certain routine speeches
over you, without in the least caring or
considering what they mean—just as the boys do,
in the same month, over Guy Fawkes; or do
they come really and truly to uphold you.
In the former case, you would be placed in
the unpleasant predicament of knowing for
certain that they laugh at you when they
go home; in the latter case, you would
have the happiness of being sure that the
Commission which declares you to be the—
in point of fact," said the Lord Mayor, with
a lingering natural reluctance, "the Humbug
already mentioned—is a piece of impotent
falsehood and malice.

"Which you know it to be," said the Lord
Mayor, rising firmly. "Which you know it
to be! Your honoured and revered friends
of the upper classes, rally round you;" (the
Lord Mayor made a note of the neat expression,
rallying round, as available for various
public occasions); "and you see them, and
you hear them, and seeing and hearing are
believing, or nothing is. Further, you are
bound as their devoted servant to believe
them, or you fall into the admission that public
functionaries have got into a way of pumping
out floods of conventional words without any
meaning and without any sincerity—a way
not likely to be reserved for Lord Mayors only,
and a very bad way for the whole community."

So, the Lord Mayor of London went to bed,
and dreamed of being made a Baronet.

WILD LEGENDS.

OBERLANSITZ is the name of a small mountain
district bordering on Bohemia; and to
the rough part of it, situated round about the
town of Zittau, the wildest legends belong.
The original inhabitants are an old race
of Czechs, and form the native population
of the highlands; but it is a Servian race
that occupies the plains below. The
Oberlansitzer is a lumpish fellow, phlegmatic
and taciturn; who, when he does open his
mouth, heaps together vowels, so as to
form the very coarsest of the German
dialects—worse even than the Silesian. He
would call what, waoiout. It would not be
unfair to say that he is not only silent but
sulky. When excited in the beerhouse or
on any holiday occasion he breaks out into
exceeding wildness; and, in that condition,
he is quick at wrath; but, slow at forgiveness,
he treasures up ideas of vengeance. Of
strangers he is very distrustful; unwilling
to guide them over his native ground, he
hides from them what he knows, tells them
none of his thoughts, and recounts to them
none of his legends. Even at home, when he
begins one of the stories in which he delights,
he blurts it out piecemeal from the corner by
the oven, slops to smoke, or breaks off
altogether if offended by any distasteful kind of
interruption. Thus it happens that the legends
current in the Oberlausitz have escaped the
notice of collectors.

Being ignorant, he is in the highest degree
superstitious. To this day the Oberlansitzer
firmly believes in witches, and regards with
superstitious reverence the executioner at
Zittau, Among the duties of that functionary
is included the banning of spirits. Whenever
anybody has committed suicide the
executioner takes with him an empty sack, and goes
to the room where the body is, in order to
be locked up alone with it for about an hour.
During that hour he holds the sack open,
dancing about and uttering, in a raving way,
strange incantations. Thus he gets, he thinks,
the soul into the sack and ties it up. Then
going out, he mounts a horse that is held ready
at the door, and dashes off in the direction of
some glen or dismal glade among the woods,
which has been regarded for centuries as a
ghost's jail; and there, with more incantation,
he unties the bag and bans the spirit to the
spot. On the pieces of ground to which spirits
are banned, they may be supposed of course
to swarm. The Pepper Hollow in Zittau,
and the Scholar's Copse, two or three miles
out of the town, are in this way especially
remarkable. The executioner has many
other duties and privileges in connection
with the spirit world, so that he is held to
be, on the whole, a more ghostly man than
even the priest, and his advice is far more
generally sought.

If I had to educate these benighted
Oberlansitzers, I do not see in what way we could
go to work more surely than by appealing to
them with our whole strength through their
fancies. Lumpish as they are, they have
imbibed in a fantastic way, from the more delicate
aspects of nature, dainty imaginings, that one
would take to belong only to a state of high
refinement; and from these they run along the
whole scale of emotion to the grimmest and
most terrible ideas. They mingle with all a
sense of humour that is one of the least common
attributes of a mere animated clod.
Some years ago, an educated Oberlansitzer,
Herr Willkomm, published a small collection
of the legends of his countrymen. I propose to
relate two or three of them—not telling
them as formal tales, but setting down enough
to show what is their nature, and suggest,
perhaps, too, a profitable thought or two to
those who, in reading them, remember what
the nature is of those poor highlanders by
whom they were invented.

Once upon a time there was a maiden named
Swanhilda, who was the only child of a
proud father, and he was dead. Her mother
had died at her birth, and she lived, therefore,
alone in her castle. To this lady many
suitors came, all of whom she scornfully and