dark with them,
as they came with fell purpose straight toward his mansion. In frenzied
terror he took his boat and rowed out to the tower in the river. But it
was of no use: down into the water marched the rats, and swam across,
and scaled the walls, and gnawed through the stones, and came swarming
in about the shrieking Bishop, and ate him up, flesh, bones, and all.
Now, bearing in mind what was said above, there can be no doubt that
these rats were the souls of those whom the Bishop had murdered. There
are many versions of the story in different Teutonic countries, and
in some of them the avenging rats or mice issue directly, by a strange
metamorphosis, from the corpses of the victims. St. Gertrude, moreover,
the heathen Holda, was symbolized as a mouse, and was said Go lead an
army of mice; she was the receiver of children's souls. Odin, also, in
his character of a Psychopompos, was followed by a host of rats. [20]

As the souls of the departed are symbolized as rats, so is the
psychopomp himself often figured as a dog. Sarameias, the Vedic
counterpart of Hermes and Odin, sometimes appears invested with canine
attributes; and countless other examples go to show that by the early
Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the
fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top,
the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be
required of him. Hence, to this day, among ignorant people, the howling
of a dog under the window is supposed to portend a death in the family.
It is the fleet greyhound of Hermes, come to escort the soul to the
river Styx. [21]

But the wind-god is not always so terrible. Nothing can be more
transparent than the phraseology of the Homeric Hymn, in which Hermes is
described as acquiring the strength of a giant while yet a babe in the
cradle, as sallying out and stealing the cattle (clouds) of Apollo,
and driving them helter-skelter in various directions, then as crawling
through the keyhole, and with a mocking laugh shrinking into his cradle.
He is the Master Thief, who can steal the burgomaster's horse from under
him and his wife's mantle from off her back, the prototype not only of
the crafty architect of Rhampsinitos, but even of the ungrateful slave
who robs Sancho of his mule in the Sierra Morena. He furnishes in part
the conceptions of Boots and Reynard; he is the prototype of Paul Pry
and peeping Tom of Coventry; and in