In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled, She called her little black cur; The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew, Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’ “Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of many and many another. “How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea, Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the old English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all sails were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew ‘cast the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s wife, and she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy. A dam broke in Holland in the seventeenth century; the peasants could hardly be restrained from burying a living child under it, when reconstructed, to ensure its stability.[18] “When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the popular superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of the arch, or to fling one over the parapet.” There! We have followed a superstition--a vile convention in ignorance and cowardice--from the Pons Sublicius in Ancient Rome to the Pont-y-Mynach in South Wales; and the best we can say of it is that in Pagan Rome it went from human victims to effigies of men and women, while in Christian times it passed from human victims to dogs.[19] Mr. Baring-Gould has told us that in bridges, and “in all such structures, a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place.” Yet it was not _in_ a structure--a finished building--that Vortigern wished to offer his sacrifice; he “sought _to lay the foundations_ of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy,” so his aim was to placate the Spirits of Evil before his castle was built. As to his conception of the spiritual agencies to be appeased, it would mingle his own passions with the fears bred by his primitive fanaticism. For, as Darwin says, “savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves felt.”