ets of towns, and when
it appears is an omen of bad luck or death. Sometimes it is said that
it runs between people's legs, and takes them on its back, and leaves
them in strange places."

"You said just now that children were buried to avert or stay the
plague, when it visited Denmark," said Hardy; "does there exist any
authentic record of such, or does it rest entirely on tradition?"

"I fear we must admit it to have occurred," replied Pastor Lindal.
"The records of it are too many and consistent to doubt the truth of
the practice. There is a tradition of a place in Jutland where all the
inhabitants died of the plague, and the inhabitants of an adjoining
town averted the spread of the pestilence by buying a child of a
gypsy, and burying it alive, which tradition says had the desired
result. There is also a tradition that on the east side of a certain
church in Jutland no one is buried, because a child was buried there
to stay the plague. At another place, two children were purchased of
very poor parents, and were buried alive in a sandhill, to stay the
pestilence then raging in the district. The people gave them some
bread and butter, to induce them to go into the living grave prepared
for them; and when the first spadeful of sand was thrown into the
hole, one of the children cried out, 'Mother, they are throwing sand
on my bread and butter!' Comparing this with the treatment of witches,
or women suspected of witchcraft, at the same epoch, it is not at all
impossible that such senseless and cruel customs prevailed. The
stories of robbers that may be well attributed to the same period have
all a cruel tinge."

"Can you tell us any?" asked Hardy.

"A very great many. One story has been adopted and embellished, and
has appeared in many lands, and it is possible that you may have heard
it, so wide has the same story spread. The story is that a rich man
had an only daughter, and amongst many suitors was a young stranger of
singularly bold manners, and she accepted him with her father's full
consent. But, as it happened, she went out for a walk in a wood near,
and she came to a cave. She was astonished to find that this cave was
inhabited and divided into rooms. There were chairs and a table and
kitchen utensils in the first room, in the second room there was much
old silver plate and costly articles, but in the inner room of all
there were portions of dead bodies. She was terrified, and would have
fled from these horr