Part 10

At length, after seven long years, the gallant heir of Lambton returned from the wars of Christendom, and found the broad lands of his ancestors laid waste and desolate. He heard the wailings of the people, for their hearts were filled with terror and alarm. He hastened to the hall of his ancestors, and received the embraces of his aged father, worn out with sorrow and grief, both for the absence of his son, whom he had considered dead, and for the dreadful waste inflicted on his fair domain by the devastations of the worm.

He took no rest until he crossed the river to examine the worm, as it lay coiled around the base of the hill, and being a knight of tried valour and sound discretion, and hearing the fate of all those who had fallen in the strife, he consulted a Sibyl on the best means to be pursued to slay the monster.

He was told that he himself had been the cause of all the misery which had been brought upon the country, which increased his grief and strengthened his resolution. He was also told that he must have his best suit of mail studded with spear–blades, and, taking his stand on the rock in the middle of the river, commend himself to Providence and the might of his sword, first making a solemn vow, if successful, to slay the first living thing he met, or, if he failed to do so, the Lords of Lambton for nine generations would never die in their beds.

He made the solemn vow in the chapel of his forefathers, and had his coat studded with the blades of the sharpest spears. He took his stand on the rock in the middle of the river, and unsheathing his trusty sword, which had never failed him in time of need, he commended himself to the will of Providence.

At the accustomed hour the worm uncoiled its lengthened folds, and, leaving the hill, took its usual course towards Lambton Hall, and approached the rock where it sometimes reposed. The knight, nothing dismayed, struck the monster on the head with all his might and main, but without producing any other visible effect than irritating and vexing the worm, which, closing on the knight, clasped its frightful coils around him, and endeavoured to strangle him in its poisonous embrace.

The knight was, however, provided against this dangerous extremity, for, the more closely he was pressed by the worm, the more deadly were the wounds inflicted by his coat of spear–blades, until the river ran with gore.

The strength of the worm diminished as its efforts increased to destroy the knight, who, seizing a favourable opportunity, made such a good use of his sword that he cut the monster in two. The severed part was immediately carried away by the current, and the worm, being thus unable to reunite itself, was, after a long and desperate conflict, destroyed by the gallantry and courage of the knight of Lambton.

The afflicted household were devoutly engaged in prayer during the combat, but on the fortunate issue, the knight, according to promise, blew a blast on his bugle to assure his father of his safety, and that he might let loose his favourite hound which was destined to be the sacrifice. The aged father, forgetting everything but his parental feelings, rushed forward to embrace his son.

When the knight beheld his father he was overwhelmed with grief. He could not raise his arm against his parent, but, hoping that his vow might be accomplished, and the curse averted by destroying the next living thing he met, he blew another blast on his bugle.

His favourite hound broke loose and bounded to receive his caresses, when the gallant knight, with grief and reluctance, once more drew his sword, still reeking with the gore of the monster, and plunged it into the heart of his faithful companion. But in vain—the prediction was fulfilled, and the Sibyl’s curse pressed heavily on the house of Lambton for nine generations.

THE OLD WOMAN AND THE CROOKED SIXPENCE.

An old woman was sweeping her house, and she found a crooked sixpence.

“What,” says she, “shall I do with this sixpence? I will go to the market and buy a pig with it.”

She went; and as she was coming home she came to a stile. Now the pig would not go over the stile. The woman went on a little further and met a dog—

“Dog,” said she, “bite pig. Piggy won’t go over the stile, and I shan’t get home to–night.”

But the dog would not bite the pig. The woman went on a little further, and she met a stick.

“Stick,” said she, “beat dog. Dog won’t bite pig, piggy won’t go over stile, and I shan’t get home to–night.”

But the stick would not. The woman went on a little further, and she met a fire.

“Fire,” said she, “burn stick. Stick won’t beat dog, dog won’t bite pig, piggy won’t go over the stile, and I shan’t get home to–night.”

But the fire would not. The woman went on a little further and she met some water.

“Water,” said she, “quench fire. Fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat dog,” etc.

But the water would not. The woman went on a little further, and she met an ox.

“Ox,” said she, “drink water. Water won’t quench fire,” etc.

But the ox would not. The woman went on again, and she met a butcher.

“Butcher,” said she, “kill ox. Ox won’t drink water,” etc.

But the butcher would not. The woman went on a little further, and met a rope.

“Rope,” said she, “hang butcher. Butcher won’t kill ox,” etc.

But the rope would not. Again the woman went on, and she met a rat.

“Rat,” said she, “gnaw rope. Rope won’t hang butcher,” etc.

But the rat would not. The woman went on a little further, and met a cat.

“Cat,” said she, “kill rat. Rat won’t gnaw rope,” etc.

“Oh,” said the cat, “I will kill the rat if you will fetch me a basin of milk from the cow over there.”

The old woman went to the cow and asked her to let her have some milk for the cat.

“No,” said the cow; “I will let you have no milk unless you bring me a mouthful of hay from yonder stack.”

Away went the old woman to the stack and fetched the hay and gave it to the cow. Then the cow gave her some milk, and the old woman took it to the cat.

When the cat had lapped the milk, the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher, the butcher began to kill the ox, the ox began to drink the water, the water began to quench the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig, and piggy, in a fright, jumped over the stile, and so, after all, the old woman got safe home that night.

THE YORKSHIRE BOGGART.

A boggart intruded himself, upon what pretext or by what authority is unknown, into the house of a quiet, inoffensive, and laborious farmer; and, when once it had taken possession, it disputed the right of domicile with the legal mortal tenant, in a very unneighbourly and arbitrary manner. In particular, it seemed to have a great aversion to children. As there is no point on which a parent feels more acutely than that of the maltreatment of his offspring, the feelings of the father, and more particularly of his good dame, were daily, ay, and nightly, harrowed up by the malice of this malignant and invisible boggart (a boggart is seldom visible to the human eye, though it is frequently seen by cattle, particularly by horses, and then they are said to “take the _boggle_,” a Yorkshireism for a shying horse). The children’s bread and butter would be snatched away, or their porringers of bread and milk would be dashed down by an invisible hand; or if they were left alone for a few minutes, they were sure to be found screaming with terror on the return of the parents, like the farmer’s children in the tale of the _Field of Terror_, whom the “drudging goblin” used to torment and frighten when he was left alone with them.

The stairs led up from the kitchen; a partition of boards covered the ends of the steps, and formed a closet beneath the staircase; a large round knot was accidentally displaced from one of the boards of this partition. One day the farmer’s youngest boy was playing with the shoe–horn, and, as children will do, he stuck the horn into this knot–hole. Whether the aperture had been found by the boggart as a peep–hole to watch the motions of the family, or whether he wished to amuse himself, is uncertain, but sure it is the horn was thrown back with surprising precision at the head of the child. It was found that as often as the horn was replaced in the hole, so surely it was ejected with a straight aim at the offender’s head. Time at length made familiar this wonderful occurrence, and that which at the first was regarded with terror, became at length a kind of amusement with the more thoughtless and daring of the family. Often was the horn slipped slyly into the hole, and the boggart never failed to dart it out at the head of one or the other, but most commonly he or she who placed it there was the mark at which the invisible foe launched the offending horn. They used to call this, in their provincial dialect, “laking wit boggart,” _i.e._, playing with the boggart. As if enraged at these liberties taken with his boggartship, the goblin commenced a series of night disturbances. Heavy steps, as of a person in wooden clogs, were often heard clattering down the stairs in the dead hour of darkness, and the pewter and earthen dishes appeared to be dashed on the kitchen floor, though, in the morning, all were found uninjured on their respective shelves.

The children were chiefly marked out as objects of dislike by their unearthly tormenter. The curtains of their beds would be violently pulled backward and forward. Anon, a heavy weight, as of a human being, would press them nearly to suffocation. They would then scream out for their “daddy” and “mammy,” who occupied the adjoining room, and thus the whole family was disturbed night after night. Things could not long go on after this fashion. The farmer and his good dame resolved to leave a place where they had not the least shadow of rest or comfort.

The farmer, whose name was George Gilbertson, was following, with his wife and family, the last load of furniture, when they met a neighbouring farmer, whose name was John Marshall, between whom and the unhappy tenant the following colloquy took place—

“Well, George, and soa you’re leaving t’ould hoose at last?”

“Heigh, Johnny, ma lad, I’m forc’d till it, for that boggart torments us soa we can neither rest neet nor day for’t. It seems loike to have such a malice again’t poor bairns. It ommost kills my poor dame here at thoughts on’t, and soa, ye see, we’re forc’d to flitt like.”

He had got thus far in his complaint when, behold! a shrill voice, from a deep upright churn, called out—

“Ay, ay, George, we ’re flitting, you see.”

“Confound thee,” says the poor farmer, “if I’d known thou’d been there I wadn’t ha stirrid a peg. Nay, nay, it’s to na use, Mally,” turning to his wife, “we may as weel turn back again to t’ould hoose, as be tormented in another that’s not sa convenient.”

They are said to have turned back, but the boggart and they afterwards came to a better understanding, though it long continued its trick of shooting the horn from the knot–hole.

THE DUERGAR.

The following encounters with the _duergar_, a species of mischievous elves, are said to have taken place on Simonside Hills, a mountainous district between Rothbury and Elsdon in Northumberland.

A person well acquainted with the locality went out one night to amuse himself with the pranks of these mysterious beings. When he had wandered a considerable time, he shouted loudly—

“Tint! tint!” and a light appeared before him, like a burning candle in the window of a shepherd’s cottage. Thither, with great caution, he bent his steps, and speedily approached a deep slough, from whence a quantity of moss or peat had been excavated, and which was now filled with mud and water. Into this he threw a piece of turf which he raised at his feet, and when the sound of the splash echoed throughout the surrounding stillness, the decoying light was extinguished. The adventurer retraced his steps, overjoyed at his dexterity in outwitting the fiendish imps, and in a moment of exultation, as if he held all the powers of darkness in defiance, he again cried to the full extent of his voice—

“Tint! tint!”

His egotism subsided, however, more quickly than it arose, when he observed three of the little demons, with hideous visages, approach him, carrying torches in their diminutive hands, as if they wished to inspect the figure of their enemy. He now betook himself to the speed of his heels for safety, but found that an innumerable multitude of the same species were gathering round him, each with a torch in one hand and a short club in the other, which they brandished with such gestures, as if they were resolved to oppose his flight, and drive him back into the morass. Like a knight of romance he charged with his oaken staff the foremost of his foes, striking them, as it seemed, to the earth, for they disappeared, but his offensive weapon encountered in its descent no substance of flesh or bone, and beyond its sweep the demons appeared to augment both in size and number. On witnessing so much of the unearthly, his heart failed him. He sank down in a state of stupor, nor was he himself again till the gray light of the morning dispersed his unhallowed opponents, and revealed before him the direct way to his own dwelling.

Another time, a traveller, wandering over these mountain solitudes, had the misfortune to be benighted, and, perceiving near him a glimmering light, he hastened thither and found what appeared to be a hut, on the floor of which, between two rough, gray stones, the embers of a fire, which had been supplied with wood, were still glowing and unconsumed. He entered, and the impression on his mind was that the place had been deserted an hour or two previously by gipsies, for on one side lay a couple of old gate–posts ready to be split up for fuel, and a quantity of refuse brush–wood, such as is left from besom making, was strewn upon the floor. With this material he trimmed the fire, and had just seated himself on one of the stones, when a diminutive figure in human shape, not higher than his knee, came waddling in at the door, and took possession of the other. The traveller, being acquainted with the manner in which things of this description ought to be regarded, retained his self–possession, kept his seat, and remained silent, knowing that if he rose up or spoke, his danger would be redoubled, and as the flame blazed up he examined minutely the hollow eyes, the stern vindictive features, and the short, strong limbs of the visitor before him. By degrees he perceived that the hut afforded little or no shelter from the cold night air, and as the energy of the fire subsided he lifted from the floor a piece of wood, broke it over his knee, and laid the fragments upon the red–hot embers. Whether this operation was regarded by his strange neighbour as a species of insult we cannot say, but the demon seized, as if in bitter mockery, one of the gate–posts, broke it likewise over its knee, and laid the pieces on the embers in the same manner. The other having no wish to witness a further display of such marvellous agency, thenceforth permitted the fire to die away, and kept his position in darkness and silence, till the fair dawn of returning day made him aware of the extreme danger to which he was exposed. He saw a quantity of white ashes before him, but the grim dwarfish intruder, with the roof and walls of the hut, were gone, and he himself, sat upon a stone, sure enough, but it formed one of the points of a deep, rugged precipice, over which the slightest inadvertent movement had been the means of dashing him to pieces.

THE BARN ELVES.

An honest Hampshire farmer was sore distressed by the nightly unsettling of his barn. However straightly, over night, he laid his sheaves on the threshing floor, for the application of the morning’s flail, when morning came all was topsy–turvy, higgledy–piggledy, though the door remained locked, and there was no sign whatever of irregular entry.

Resolved to find out who played him these mischievous pranks, Hodge couched himself one night deeply among the sheaves, and watched for the enemy. At length midnight arrived. The barn was illuminated as if by moonbeams of wonderful brightness, and through the keyhole came thousands of elves, the most diminutive that could be imagined. They immediately began their gambols among the straw, which was soon in the most admired disorder. Hodge wondered, but interfered not, but at last the supernatural thieves began to busy themselves in a way still less to his taste, for each elf set about conveying the crop away, a straw at a time, with astonishing activity and perseverance. The keyhole was still their port of egress and regress, and it resembled the aperture of a beehive, on a sunny day in June. The farmer was rather annoyed at seeing his grain vanish in this fashion, when one of the fairies, while hard at work, said to another, in the tiniest voice that ever was heard—

“I weat; you weat?” (I sweat; do you sweat?)

Hodge could contain himself no longer. He leapt out, crying—

“The deuce sweat ye! Let me get among ye.”

The fairies all flew away so frightened that they never disturbed the barn any more.

LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR.

Immemorial tradition has asserted that King Arthur, his queen Guinevere, court of lords and ladies, and his hounds, were enchanted in some cave of the crags, or in a hall below the castle of Sewingshields, and would continue entranced there till some one should first blow a bugle–horn that lay on a table near the entrance into the hall, and then “with the sword of stone” cut a garter, also placed there beside it. But none had ever heard where the entrance to this enchanted hall was, till a farmer at Sewingshields, about fifty years since, was sitting knitting on the ruins of the castle, and his clew fell and ran downwards through a bush of briars and nettles, as he supposed, into a deep subterranean passage. Full in the faith that the entrance into King Arthur’s hall was now discovered, he cleared the briary portal of its weeds and rubbish, and entering a vaulted passage, followed, in his darkling way, the web of his clew. The floor was infested with toads and lizards, and the dark wings of bats, disturbed by his unhallowed intrusion, flitted fearfully around him. At length his sinking faith was strengthened by a dim, distant light, which, as he advanced, grew gradually lighter, till, all at once, he entered a vast and vaulted hall, in the centre of which a fire without fuel, from a broad crevice in the floor, blazed with a high and lambent flame, that showed all the carved walls and fretted roof, and the monarch and his queen and court reposing around in a theatre of thrones and costly couches. On the floor, beyond the fire, lay the faithful and deep–toned pack of thirty couple of hounds, and on the table, before it, the spell–dissolving horn, sword, and garter. The farmer reverently but firmly grasped the sword, and as he drew it leisurely from its rusty scabbard, the eyes of the monarch and his courtiers began to open, and they rose till they sat upright. He cut the garter, and, as the sword was being slowly sheathed, the spell assumed its ancient power, and they all gradually sank to rest, but not before the monarch lifted up his eyes and hands, and exclaimed—

“O woe betide that evil day On which this witless wight was born Who drew the sword—the garter cut, But never blew the bugle–horn.”

Of this favourite tradition, the most remarkable variation is respecting the place where the farmer descended. Some say that after the king’s denunciation, terror brought on loss of memory, and the farmer was unable to give any correct account of his adventure, or the place where it occurred. All agree that Mrs. Spearman, the wife of another and more recent occupier of the estate, had a dream in which she saw a rich hoard of treasure among the ruins of the castle, and that for many days together she stood over workmen employed in searching for it, but without success.

Another version of the story has less of “the pomp of sceptred state” than the preceding, and has evidently sprung from a baser original, but its verity is not the less to be depended upon.

A shepherd one day, in quest of a strayed sheep on the crags, had his attention aroused by the scene around him assuming an appearance he had never before witnessed. There seemed to be about it a more than wonted vividness, and such a deep solemnity hung over its aspect, that its features became, as it were, palpably impressed upon his mind. While he was musing upon this unexpected occurrence, his steps were arrested by a ball of thread. This he laid hold of, and, pursuing the path it pointed out, found it led into a cavern, in the recesses of which, as the guiding line used by miners in their explorations of devious passages, it appeared to lose itself. As he approached, he felt perforce constrained to follow the strange conductor, that had so marvellously come into his hands. After passing through a long and dreary vestibule, he entered into an apartment in the interior. An immense fire blazed on the hearth, and cast its broad flashes with a wild, unearthly glare, to the remotest corner of the chamber. Over it was placed a huge caldron, as if preparations were being made for a feast on an extensive scale. Two hounds lay couchant on either side of the fire–place, in the stillness of unbroken slumber. The only remarkable piece of furniture in the apartment was a table covered with green cloth. At the head of the table, a being, considerably advanced in years, of a dignified mien, and clad in the habiliments of war, sat, as it were, fast asleep, in an arm–chair. At the other end of the table lay a horn and a sword. Notwithstanding these signs of life, there prevailed a dead silence throughout the chamber, the very feeling of which made the shepherd reflect that he had advanced far beyond the limits of human experience, and that he was now in the presence of objects that belonged more to death than to life. The very idea made his flesh creep. He, however, had sufficient fortitude to advance to the table and lift the horn. The hounds pricked up their ears most fearfully, and the grisly veteran started up on his elbow, and raising his half–unwilling eyes, told the staggered hind that if he would blow the horn and draw the sword, he would confer upon him the honours of knighthood to last through time. Such unheard–of dignities, from a source so ghastly, either met with no appreciation from the awe–stricken swain, or the terror of finding himself alone in the company, it might be of malignant phantoms, who were only tempting him to his ruin, became too urgent to be resisted, and, therefore, proposing to divide the peril with a comrade, he groped his darkling way, as best his quaking limbs could support him, back to the blessed daylight. On his return, with a reinforcement of strength and courage, all traces of the former scene had disappeared. The crags presented their usual cheerful and quiet aspect, and every vestige of the opening of a cavern was obliterated. Thus failed another of the repeated opportunities for releasing the spell–bound king of Britain from the “charmed sleep of ages.” Within his rocky chamber he still sleeps on, as tradition tells, till the appointed hour; or if invited by his enchantress to participate in the illusions of the fairy festival, it has charms for him no longer. “Wasted with care,” he sits beside her—the banquet untasted—the pageantry unmasked—

“... By constraint Her guest, and from his native land withheld By sad necessity.”

SILKY.