he "three causeless blows." It may be so, though there
is no hint of this in the stories; and yet her former condition need not
have been that of a ghost of the dead, nor her earlier home the tomb. By
far the greater number of these stories represent the maiden as a
water-nymph; but it is the depths of the earth rather than the water
which are commonly regarded as the dwelling-place of the departed.
Moreover, the correspondence I have tried to point out between the
etiquette of various peoples and the taboo,--such, for instance, as the
ban upon a husband's breaking into his wife's seclusion at a delicate
moment in his family history,--would remain, on Liebrecht's theory,
purely accidental. Nor would the theory account for the absence of a
taboo in the lower savagery, nor for the totemistic character of the
lady, nor, least of all, for the peltry which is the most picturesque,
if not the most important, incident in this group of tales.

In fact, the only direct evidence for Liebrecht's contention is the
variant of Wild Edric's legend alluded to by Map. His words are,
speaking of Alnoth, Edric's son, a great benefactor of the see of
Hereford: "The man whose mother vanished into air openly in the sight of
many persons, being indignant at her husband's reproaching her that he
had carried her off by force from among the dead (_quod cam a mortuis
rapuisset_)." Upon this it is to be observed that the expression here
made use of cannot be regarded as one which had accidentally dropped out
of the narrative previously given; but it is an allusion to an
independent and inconsistent version, given in forgetfulness that the
writer had already in another part of his work related the story at
large and with comments. There he had explicitly called Alnoth--the heir
and offspring of a devil (_daemon_), and had expressed his wonder that
such a person should have given up his whole inheritance (namely, the
manor of Ledbury North, which he made over to the see of Hereford in
gratitude for the miraculous cure of his palsy) to Christ in return for
his restored health, and spent the rest of his life as a pilgrim.
Mediaeval writers (especially ecclesiastics) were in a difficulty in
describing fairies. They looked upon them as having an objective
existence; and yet they knew not how to classify them. Fairies were
certainly neither departed saints nor holy angels. Beside these two
kinds of spirits, the only choice left was between devils and ghos