rushes through the lodge as a raging current, bearing rocks and trees along in its tremendous course, and then the guardian spirit of the islands of Lake Superior enters in the guise of rolling waves covered with silver-sparkling foam.[1] Or they may be guiding and power-giving spirits of nature, like the spirit Fugamu, whose work is the cataract of the Nguyai, and who still wanders night and day around it, though the negroes who tell of him can no longer see his bodily form.[2] The belief prevailing through the lower culture that the diseases which vex mankind are brought by individual personal spirits, is one which has produced striking examples of mythic development. Thus in Burma the Karen lives in terror of the mad 'la,' the epileptic 'la,' and the rest of the seven evil demons who go about seeking his life; and it is with a fancy not many degrees removed from this early stage of thought that the Persian sees in bodily shape the apparition of Al, the scarlet fever: —
'Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,
With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.'[3]
It is with this deep old spiritualistic belief clearly in view that the ghastly tales are to be read where pestilence and death come on their errand in weird human shape. To the mind of the Israelite, death and pestilence took the personal form of the destroying angel who smote the doomed.[4] When the great plague raged in Justinian's time, men saw on the sea brazen barks whose crews were black and headless men, and where they landed, the pestilence broke out.[5] When the plague fell on Rome in Gregory's time, the saint rising from prayer saw Michael standing with his bloody sword on Hadrian's castle — the archangel stands there yet in bronze, giving the old fort its newer name of the Castle of
