Part 13

Chapter 131,628 wordsPublic domain

It is asserted that at the present day dogs cannot be induced to go near this quarry, and that even closely hunted animals will permit themselves to be captured rather than enter its recesses.

32.

Few superstitions have a wider circle of believers in Lancashire than that which attributes to dogs the power of foretelling death and disaster. There are few people, however well educated, who would be able to resist a foreboding of coming woe if they heard the howling of a strange dog under the window of a sick person's room; and, absurd as the dread so inspired may seem to the sceptic, there is more ground for it than can easily be explained away. It has frequently been urged that the animals are attracted by the lighted window, and that their howlings are nothing more than unpleasant appeals for admittance; and that often, by reason of the awe with which tradition has surrounded the noises, they terrify the invalid, and produce the end they are supposed to foretell. This plausible theory, however, does not account in any way for the similar visitations made in the daytime, when there is no artificial light to attract; or for the singular facts, that generally the dog is a stranger to the locality--that it does not loiter about, but makes its way direct to the particular house--that it will wait until a gate is opened, so that it may get near to the window--that it cannot be driven away before its mission has been performed--and that, in all cases, the howling is alike, invariably terminating in three peculiar yelping barks, which are no sooner uttered than the animal runs off, and is no more seen in the neighbourhood.

In Normandy the noise is considered an infallible presage of death.

Mr. Kelly says that this superstition obtains credence in France and Germany; and that in Westphalia, a dog howling along a road is considered a sure sign that a funeral soon will pass that way. In the Scandinavian mythology, Hel, Goddess of Death, is visible only to dogs.

The superstition has, at any rate, antiquity to recommend it, and it seems evident from Exodus xi. 5-7, that even in the days of the captivity of the Children of Israel in Egypt, the omen was firmly believed in.

I was seated one summer evening in the drawing-room of a house in one of the large London squares. The conversation was of the ordinary after-dinner nature, but enlivened by the remarks of more than one gifted guest. It was, however, suddenly interrupted in a very startling manner by the howling of a dog, which had placed itself in the roadway facing the house, regardless alike of the wheels of the numerous passing carriages and cabs, and of the whips of the drivers. The lady of the house, a north-country woman, said at once, as she rose from her seat at the open window, 'That means death. I shall hear of some sad trouble.' The dog would not be driven away by the angry coachmen and cabmen, but finished the howling with three peculiar yelps, and then trotted off rapidly; and there was much jesting during the rest of the evening about the strange occurrence. A few days afterwards, however, I was informed that on the evening of the dinner-party the brother of the hostess had died in North Lancashire.

33.

'Th' Gabriel Ratchets' strike terror into the heart of many a moorland dweller in Lancashire and Yorkshire still, presaging, as they are believed to do, death or sorrow to every one who is so unfortunate as to hear them. In the popular idea they are a pack of dogs yelping through the air. Our old literature has many references to the superstition. In more recent days, Wordsworth has introduced it in one of his sonnets:--

'And oftentimes will start-- For overhead are sweeping GABRIEL'S HOUNDS.'

Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in a poem dated 1849, in his _Isles of Loch Awe and other Poems_, which he has kindly given me permission to quote here, says of them,--

'Faintly sounds the airy note, And the deepest bay from the staghound's throat, Like the yelp of a cur, on the air doth float, And hardly heard is the wild halloo.'

and--

'They fly on the blast of the forest That whistles round the withered tree, But where they go we may not go, Nor see them as they fly.'

Mr. Hamerton, however, goes beyond the Lancashire peasant, at any rate so far as I have been able to ascertain, for I never met any one in the hill country or on the moorlands of the North who fancied that the throng included anything but _Ratchets_, _i.e._ dogs, for the poet goes on to sing--

'Hark! 'tis the goblin of the wood Rushing down the dark hill-side, With steeds that neigh and hounds that bay.'

Mr. Henderson has recorded that, about Leeds, the flight is supposed to be that of 'the souls of unbaptized children doomed to flit restlessly above their parents' abode.' In Germany, certainly the Wild Hunt or Furious Host is accompanied by unbaptized children, and it has been recorded that a woman, about the year 1800, died of grief upon learning that the Furious Host had passed over the village where her still-born child had died just before. Mr. Kelly (_Indo-European Tradition_) very ably and poetically resolves all the various superstitions of this Wild Hunt into figurative descriptions of natural phenomena, but Mr. Yarrell, the distinguished naturalist, reduces the cries of the Gabriel Hounds into the whistling of the Bean Goose, _Anser Segetum_, as the flocks are flying southward in the night, migrating from Scandinavia.

In Wales 'The Whistlers,' the cry of the golden-plover, is considered an omen of death, but it seems to be a quite distinct superstition from that of the _Cwn Annwn_, or Dogs of Hell, which latter is a Wild Hunt.

I have heard the weird cry of the Gabriel Ratchets at night in several of the northern countries, and in the loneliness and gloom of early winter in the heart of the hills, or upon a wild bleak moorland, it was difficult to overcome a sudden feeling of dread when the yelps rang forth, even with Mr. Yarrell's scientific explanation fresh in my mind.

To sketch the ramifications of the superstition of the Wild Hunt, however, would require a volume, so numerous and various are they.

34.

In the old witch-mania records it is not unusual to find a cock sacrificed to the Evil One, and Satan's dislike of cock-crow has become proverbial. Brand has pointed out that the Christian poet Prudentius (fourth century) mentions that antipathy as a tradition of common belief. In an old German story Satan builds a house for a peasant who agrees to pay his soul for the work. A condition is made, however, that this house must be completed before cock-crow, and the wily peasant, just before the last tile is put on the roof, imitates the bird of morn, upon which all the cocks in the locality crow, and Satan, baffled, flees.

The Evil One's appearance in the form of a cat, a goat, a pig, an old woman, a black dog, a stylish gentleman, and the conventional shape, with hoof and horns, have been testified to, and Calmet (_Traité sur les apparitions des Esprits et sur les Vampires_, 1751) alludes to his taking the shape of a raven, but I have not met with any record of his appearance as a cock. In this case, however, that was insisted upon, although it was suggested that it might have been some other fowl.

EDINBURGH: T. AND A. CONSTABLE,

PRINTERS TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.