liberty. I remarked to my father on what I saw, and he at once removed me into the shade, within the carriage. I still saw the little creatures for awhile, but gradually they became fewer and finally disappeared altogether. The vision was due to the sun on my head, but why the sun should conjure up such a vision is to me inexplicable. I cannot recall that my nurse at Bratton had ever spoken to me of, and described, the Pixies.
Here I am going to allow myself a digression on Gnomes or Pixies.
It is a curious fact that my wife has seen one, or thinks that she has, in Yorkshire. In a green lane at Horbury she saw, or fancied she saw, a little man about two feet in height, clothed in green, sitting in the hedge. He had black beady eyes, and looked hard at her. She stood observing him for a while, and then, when he began to make faces at her, she became frightened, and ran away.
My son Julian, one day in 1883, was in the garden picking pea-pods, between two rows of peas, when he saw a little dwarf in brown with a red cap looking at him, and walking towards him. He was so frightened that he ran away and came into the house, white as ashes, and told me and his mother what he had seen. He was then aged six.[1] In both these cases the apparitions may be traced to sun on the head, but why take such similar forms?
Plenty of stories are told, more or less circumstantially, of the "Knockers" or gnomes of mines believed in in Cornwall, Wales, and in Germany. They may be seen in Mrs. Hardinge Britten's Nineteenth Century Miracles, 1884. But this will suffice. Mr. C. G. Isham, of Lamport Hall, erected a rock garden in his grounds and peopled it with a crowd of gnomes made of terracotta.
How noticeable in the progress of mankind in knowledge is the fact that before the opening of a door hitherto shut, another door that has swung wide for generations should be slammed and double bolted. For untold ages our ancestors had believed in a
- ↑ As an instance of the manner in which materialism is washing out all spiritual fancies, I may mention that when my son, after this vision, and with his mind full of tales of gnomes and fairies inhabiting an underground world, asked the gardener, "Crossman, is there a world beneath the soil on which we tread?" received the answer, "To be sure, sir, there is. It is the Dung World."
