Hard by is Clakeywell Pool, by some called Crazy-well. It is an old mine-work, now filled with water. It covers nearly an acre, and the banks are in part a hundred feet high. According to popular belief, at certain times at night a loud voice is heard calling from the water in articulate tones, naming the next person who is to die in the parish. At other times what are heard are howls as of a spirit in torment. The sounds are doubtless caused by a swirl of wind in the basin that contains the pond. An old lady, now deceased, told me how that as a child she dreaded going near this tarn--she lived at Shaugh--fearing lest she should hear the voice calling her by name. The idea of mysterious voices is a very old one. The schoolboy will recall the words of Virgil in the first _Georgic_:-- "Vox ... per lucos vulgo exaudita silentes Ingens." The "wisht hounds" that sweep overhead in the dark barking are brent-geese going north or returning south. They have given occasion to many stories of strange voices in the sky. In Ceylon the devil-bird has been the source of much superstitious terror. A friend who has long lived in Ceylon says: "Never shall I forget when first I heard it. I was at dinner, when suddenly the wildest, most agonised shrieks pierced my ear. I was under the impression that a woman was being murdered outside my house. I snatched up a cudgel and ran forth to her aid, but saw no one." The natives regard this cry of the mysterious devil-bird with the utmost fear. They believe that to hear it is a sure presage of death; and they are not wrong. When they have heard it, they pine to death, killed by their own conviction that life is impossible. Autenrieth, professor and physician at Tübingen, in 1822 published a treatise on _Aërial Voices_, in which he collected a number of strange accounts of mysterious sounds heard in the sky, and which he thought could not all be deduced from the cries of birds at night. He thus generalises the sounds:--