One word of caution must be given relative to the Druids, who are credited with so much. It is true that there were Druids in Britain and in Ireland, but they were the schamans, or medicine-men, of the earlier Ivernian race, who maintained their repute among the conquering Celts, and their representatives at the present day are the white witches who practise on the credulity of our villagers. CHAPTER VI. DEAD MEN'S DUST Cairns on Dartmoor--Why mostly in solitary places and on hilltops--The theory of wearing mourning--Its real origin--Various modes of deceiving the dead or discouraging them from returning--The desire of the ghost to get home--Is cajoled or scared away--How widows get rid of the ghosts of their first husbands--Disguising the dead. One of the most striking experiences of an explorer of Dartmoor is the coming upon great cairns in the most remote and inaccessible parts of that waste. Not a lone hill surrounded by bogs is without its great mound of earth or pile of stones over some dead man. In the howling wilderness about Cranmere Pool, where are no traces of human habitation, there lie the dead. On every rise above the swamps and fathomless morasses of Fox Tor, there they are scattered thick. Almost always the dead were conveyed to the tops of hills, or placed on the brows of elevations far away from the settlements of the living. Why was this? Because prehistoric men were in fear of their dead people. I remember, in 1860, riding across the central desert of Iceland, and coming about midnight, when the summer sun was just dipped below the polar sea, on a solitary cairn among pools of frozen water and amidst illimitable tracts of volcanic ash. My guide told me it was the grave of one Glamr, who had so haunted the farms in the Vatnsdal that the people of the valley had combined to dig him up and transport the corpse almost a day's journey into the central desert, where they cut off his head, and buried the body in a sitting posture with his own skull as his throne, an indignity which the ghost was likely to so resent as never to venture to show again. The heathen Icelander, on the death of a father in the family, was removed by the anxious heir to the estate in an ingenious manner. The wall of the house behind the bed was broken through, and the corpse drawn out of doors by that way, and then the opening was hastily repaired. He was then hurried off to his grave. The heir was so afraid lest the venerable party should saunter home again and reclaim his property, that the father was carried forth in this peculiar manner in order to bewilder him and make him find a difficulty in returning. A strip of black cloth an inch and a half in width stitched round the sleeve--that is the final, or perhaps penultimate relic (for it may dwindle further to a black thread) of the usage of wearing mourning on the decease of a relative.