PIXY-LED.

SOMERSET roads below Mendip are steep beyond the capacity of anybody except Somerset men and horses. They have a trick of startling you with an exaggerated descent at some sudden turn in the lane. Rounding the corner, you seem to have come all at once to the edge of the world, so abruptly does the ground fall away from the level, and the wheel-tracks ahead look as if they ran away over the rim of the solid earth, and were stopped by nothing but space and sky. But when you reach the brow the road is really going on all the while, and the illusion has only been one of those forms of deception peculiar to Somerset, which is a county possessing a larger quantity of curious things and people than any other region in the known universe. And even on the level roadways there is always an element of adventure, for many strange things may be shut in between the tangled hedges. In one lonely byway, according to local tradition, there is much buried treasure, hidden there long since by a highwayman who used to beset the road. The lane is now an impassable tangle of brambles and nettles, sunk deep between fields, and hard to find unless you know where to look ; but there lies a great hoard to enrich whoever can find it. And not far from the treasure-lane there is another one con- taining a pond which by common report is bottomless, and may reach through to the centre of the earth for anything the village people can tell to the contrary. At any rate, it has never been dry within the memory of man. Then there is the road that runs by the Stones, popularly called the Wedding, whereof tradition tells the usual legend, and local authority further asserts that no living man has ever been able to count those stones properly. A baker once went, so the story goes, with two baskets full of loaves, and swore he would tell the number by putting a loaf on each stone. But he never managed to tell it twice alike, despite the loaves. And if you are wise you avoid that place after dark.

In lonely places, among such steep hills as these, ancient traditions linger on in the life of to-day. But though most of the folk-lore tales are fading from the memory of the people, the primeval instinct of fear before unknown natural forces lasts on in the hearts of a people properly "pagan" by situation, and inheriting immemorial supersti- tions of bygone races. Local names preserve old ideas, to-day apparently forgotten, but surviving in kindred superstitions difficult to unearth because they are so deep-rooted. Pixy Hole is such a name, and few people here can tell you what a pixy is. And, indeed, very few have occasion to know the name, for the place is so remote that scarcely any one ever needs to pass by it.

Pixy Hole lies just over a precipitous fall of the road that looks across the marsh up to the great gloom of Mendip shutting out half the sky. The hill is so steep that the shadows of men and horses coming up the road when the sun is low, far off beyond the end of the hills, are flung together in grotesque distortions, so that no one could recognise mortal• antecedents in the queer goblin shapes sliding at their feet. But you can avoid shadows by reaching it southward from Babylon, scrambling down the fields till you come to the very bottom of all things, which is Pit Lane, buried so deep between banks that no wind ever blows there to shake the curtain of hart's-tongue that covers the banks and the limestone cuttings with a dense garment of green.

But in storms the water races ankle-deep and the wind tears high overhead like a frenzied thing. The other end of Pit Lane rises up and turns you out on the cross-roads near Pixy Hole. There is one farm, and beyond that the land drops down abruptly to an utter desolation of marsh-land and water ruffled under the continual go-and-come of winds that sweep the length of the valley. Up above, the pinnacled tower of a little church, standing all alone among the hills, lifts an immovable stony finger skywards. But Pixy Hole keeps out of sight of the finger ; it lies lower down where the road falls as steep as a roof. The fields rise up above the road, so that you must climb the bank and mount a twisted stile before you get into Pixy Hole, which is a little meadow blue with knapweed in haytime and shadowed perpetually with the gloom of the great hills beyond. There is a thicket of stunted wind-blown oak, and a few ash-trees, and a tangle of thorn and bramble, behind which a little brook tinkles unseen, and the brambles weave an impenetrable defence before it with magnificent curving stems, crimson and leaden purple, spurred with thorns like steel, hollow-grooved for toughness, and bearing sparse symmetrical leaves like beaten iron. These are the only pixy traces about the place, and the reason of the name remains unexplained in the category of other things inexplicable,—as, for instance, why ash-trees look wet in a midsummer drought ; or why a furze thicket will make believe to present an impenetrable barrier of spikes, and then will yield a path to those who press in undaunted, as if it were a way through deep water ; or why the wild things in a wood will at times beset the hair and clothes of the explorer with an altogether unvegetable malignity, and at other seasons let him (or her) pass by unscathed. These are questions which the age of the world has left yet unsolved.

You can get no stories to-day about Pixy Hole. Fairies and pixies have left the traditions of the peasantry, but the old instinct which peopled the unknown with fears is ineradicable. The shadow-haunted imagination of their Northern forefathers in old days filled all the wastes with half-seen ghostly beings, beneficent or malign, " ettyns, and elves, and orkneys" lurking in all twilit solitudes, and wide spaces where" winds blow, moors and marshes and open hill- sides. And the instinct is perdurable in the race. Neither education nor the parson can lay the ghost of pagan beliefs lurking in the heart of Somerset, because fear of unseen evil and the power of malignity are passions of deadly strength te last. Faith in witchcraft and dread of the "evil eye" are strong in the people. In remote places when their dreams are "bag- rode," or their cattle die and their children ail, they believe themselves "over-looked," and suspect a neighbour, or consult a "planet-ruler." Many an old woman in these villages has a character for witchcraft, and is respected and shunned accordingly. " Her'll witch thee for sartin," is a warning not infrequently given now in the twentieth century. A short while since an old woman dying confessed how in earlier days she had borne some man a grudge and cast a spell on him, of which (or so she believed) be died. The " witching " included all such ancient magic as gathering herbs unseen at a certain time and burying them at night in a field with certain incanta- tions, probably of the nature of one quoted in "Bygone Somerset" as having been used within the last ten years by two old people. These two tried to injure an enemy by hang- ing up before the fire a sheep's heart stuck full of pins and chanting before it this charm :—

"It is not this heart I wish to burn,

But the heart of a person I wish to turn, Wishing them neither peace nor rest Till they are dead and gone."

Since the fascinations of the occult and belief in "the

wizards that peep and that mutter low down in the dust" are strong upon people of other rank and education, it is small wonder if in silent lonely places terror and mystery should take hold upon simple folks and subdue them to a blind terror of some power unknown, which is very mischievous in its results. Not always, however; there is a lighter side to it. Not far from Pixy Hole lives an old mole-catcher who is credited with occult powers. But he uses them for good, and cures many of the minor ills of life, including warts, which he removes in this manner. He touches the afflicted spot and looks upwards, muttering an incantation. The sufferer then has to rub the wart with a piece of elder-bark, throwing it away when he is certain of not being seen. The advantages of this system are clear. And since "a-catchin' o' moles" is, according to the West Country song, a trade which teaches those who engage in it many secrets 'of the human heart, it seems possible that the old man has less faith than his patients in his occult powers. But his reputation and his revenue both prosper.

Now time-honoured superstitions do little harm to anybody, such, for instance, as that which holds it unlucky to give bellows for a wedding present, or that which sees a menace to some one in the house when a hearse comes back to the door after a funeral. The old sense remains of bidden mysterious ways apart from the human ways, yet crossing them for ever, like the pixies of the waste places. The pixy proper of folk- lore is less malign than teasing, a beguiling spirit of double- ness that sets you at odds with your own wits, which is the most uncomfortable thing that can happen to anybody in a world already sufficiently perplexing. And, indeed, something of this sense of the doubleness of things is necessary to keep us from being shut off too far from the unseen that claims some unknown sense within us with so exquisite a pang. But the blind terror of the unknown which forms the basis of religion among ignorant peoples is a malignant power that penetrates deep even in modern life. Nor does it lie only among the crude faiths and superstitions of the Somerset peasantry. Not far from Pixy Hole a road runs east and west above the length of the valley, and from the far end you can see the Channel water shimmering in a golden streak beneath the sunset that lights the sky and the hills with colours as radiant as the foundations of the New. Jerusalem. Twice every day all the year through you may meet on that road one of the saddest figures in the world :—

" The grave unto a soul,

Holding the eternal spirit, against her will, In the Tile prison of afflicted breath."

It is a crazy man who believes himself under a curse and thinks the gates of Paradise are closed on him. So every day he goes to the hilltop from which he can see the sunset beyond the bills, and when the light has faded the gates close once more and he goes home again. He never speaks, and walks very fast with his head down, and the thin, melancholy figure going up and down that beautiful road is one of the most pitiful things in the world. Somehow he has missed the blessed gift of happiness that keeps the world clean, and then

it is that the old terrors of the unseen come to craze poor human wits and leave them a prey to the "hobgoblins and satyrs and dragons of the pit" which beset the dark ways of this Valley of Shadows and bring the dreadful brain-sickness that is beyond human power to cure. For in spite of all we are told of superstitions and brain projections and the subliminal self, there is no skill which unlocks all the secrets

"of that that's under lock and key :

Man's soul."