have not treated the animals well; an enemy to cats may reckon upon it that he will be carried to his grave in wind and rain ;* and in Holland, if the weather is rainy on a wedding-day, the saying is that the bride has neglected to feed the cat.† Seeing that these sly creatures know so much of the weather, and are more than suspected of having a share in making it, nothing can be more unwise than to provoke them, as English sailors know very well. They do not much like to see cats on board, but least of all do they like to see them unusually frisky, for then they say "the cat has a gale of wind in her tail." An infallible recipe for raising a storm is to throw a cat overboard.‡ The presence of a dead hare on board ship is also said to bring bad weather. §

Cats, though inveterate milk-stealers, very rarely rob the dairy in any but the natural way; on the other hand, witch-cats have a great hankering after beer, a liquor into which no canny puss will dip her whiskers. Witches are adepts in the art of brewing (p. 221), and therefore fond of making parties to taste what their neighbours brew. It appears that on these occasions they always masquerade as cats, and what they steal they consume on the spot.

*Mannhardt, p. 90.

"Choice Notes," p. 160.

"Notes and Queries," x. 184. § Ibid.

238

САТ. NIGHTMARE.

There was a countryman whose beer was all drunk up by night whenever he brewed, so that at last he resolved for once to sit up all night and watch. Well, as he was standing by his brewing copper, up came a great lot of cats, and he called to them,. Come, puss, puss, come warm you a bit." So they all squatted in a great ring round the fire as if to warm themselves. After they had sat there for a while, he asked them if the water was hot. 'Just on the boil," said they, and as they spoke he dipped his long-handled pail in the wort, and soused the whole company with it. They all vanished at once; but on the following day his wife had a terribly scalded face, and then he knew who it was that had always drunk up his beer.*

This story appears to be widely spread. I know it to be current among the Flemish-speaking natives of Belgium.

The nightmare, also, often appears as a cat. A joiner in Bühl, who was much plagued with the nightmare, at last saw it steal into his room in that shape about midnight. Having stopped up the hole through which the cat had come in, he caught the animal, and nailed it by one paw to the floor. Next morning, instead of a cat, it was a handsome naked

* Kuhn u. Schwartz, Ndd. p. 287.

woman he found, with a nail driven through her hand. He married her, and they had three children; but one day he uncovered the hole he had stopped up; she escaped through it instantly in the shape of a cat, and never returned.*

There are a great number of cases on record in which German nightmares have been caught by stopping up the hole through which they had entered, and either striking a light or waiting till day, when the nightmare is always found in human form, and naked, like Tamlane in the old ballad. The sequel of the story is almost always the same as in that of the joiner of Bühl, except that the departing mahrt, or mårte, often makes some exclamation about England, and that in many instances she comes back every Saturday evening, but invisible, and brings clean linen for her husband and children.

In a village near Riesenburg, in East Prussia, there was a girl, who, unknown to herself, was every night transformed into a black cat. In the morning she used to feel exhausted as after a heavy dream; but the fact was that in her transformed state she used to go to her betrothed lover and scratch and torment him. One night he caught the cat and tied it up in

* Baader Volkssagen, No. 136.

a sack, in which he found next morning no cat, but his naked sweetheart. The parson of the parish cured her.*

In standard German the nightmare is called Alp, i. e., Elf. It has many German provincial names, the most current of which is Mahrt, Mårte, or Mahr, different forms of a word which has no relation to the equine species, but is identical with the Sanscrit Marut (p. 17). Sometimes the nightmare appears as a mouse, a weasel, or a toad, but never, I believe, as a horse or mare, except in Fuseli's wellknown engraving, which must have been designed after one of those suppers of half-raw pork from which the artist was wont to draw inspiration. It is a bit of false etymology embodied in a corresponding style of art.

The nightmare, or night-hag,† is equestrian, not equine. It is an old story in England, and still is common in Germany, that they infest stables at night and mount the horses, which are found sweating in their stalls in the morning as after a hard ride. These riders, in all other respects iden

* Tettau und Temme, Ostpreussen, p. 274.

Hag, Anglo-Saxon hægesse, is the German hexe, witch, a word as

applicable to a young and comely woman as to an ugly old crone.

Brand, iii. 147.

tical with the Mahrts, are in some parts of Germany called Walriderske, i. e., Valkyrs. In some of the tales that are told of them, they still retain their old divine nature; in others they are brought down to the common level of mere earthly witches. If they ride now in stables, without locomotion, it is because they swept of old through the air on their divine coursers. Now they steal by night to the beds of hinds and churls; but there was a time when they descended from Valhalla to conceive, in the embrace of a mortal, the demigod whom they afterwards accompanied to the battle-field, to bear him thence to the hall of Odin.

R