nally to them, and gave them
instruction in herbs and medicine, predicting that they and their issue
would become during many generations the most renowned physicians in the
country.[198]

Such is the legend of the Van Pool. It has a number of variants, both in
Wales and elsewhere, the examination of which I postpone for the
present. Hitherto I have been guided in the mention of variants of this
myth chiefly by the desire of showing how one type insensibly merges
into another. The only type I have now left for examination may be
called the "Nightmare type." It is allied not so much to the stories of
Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool as to stories like that of the
Croatian wolf-maiden. According to German and Slavonic belief the
nightmare is a human being--frequently one whose love has been slighted,
and who in this shape is enabled to approach the beloved object. It
slips through the keyhole, or any other hole in a building, and presses
its victim sometimes to death. But it can be caught by quickly stopping
the hole through which it has entered. A certain man did so one night;
and in the morning he found a young and lovely maiden in the room. On
asking her whence she came, she told him from Engelland (angel-land,
England). He hid her clothes, married her, and had by her three
children. The only thing peculiar about her was that she used constantly
to sing while spinning:

"Now calls my mother (_or_, blows my father) in Engelland,
Mary Catharine,
Drive out thy swine."

One day her husband came home and found that his wife had been telling
the children that she had come as a nightmare from Engelland. When he
reproached her for it, she went to the cupboard where her clothes were
hidden, threw them over herself, and vanished. Yet she could not quite
forsake her husband and little ones. On Saturdays she came unseen and
laid out their clean clothes; and every night she appeared while others
slept, and taking the baby out of the cradle quieted it at her breast.
The allusion to the nightmare's clothes is uncommon; but it is an
unmistakable link with the types we have been considering. In other
tales she is caught in the shape of a straw; and she is generally
released by taking the stopper out of the hole whereby she entered. The
account she gives of herself is that she has come out of England, that
the pastor had been guilty of some omission in the service when she was
baptized, and hence she became a nightm