Even the spread and prevalence of Christian knowledge have scarcely disenchanted Wales of its superstitions. Few persons who know anything at all of the country, however slight such knowledge may be, are unaware of this characteristic of the people. This remark was, no doubt, far more applicable even twenty-five years since than now. The writer of this volume has listened to the stories of many who believed that they had seen the _Canwyll-y-corph_—corpse-candles—wending their way from houses, more or less remote, to the churchyard. Mr. Borrow, also, in his “Wild Wales,” tells us how he conversed with people in his travels who believed that they had seen the corpse-candles. But a hundred years ago, this was a universal object of faith; as was also the belief in coffins and burial trains seen wending their way, in the dead of night, to the churchyard. Omens and predictions abounded everywhere, while singular legends and traditions in many districts hung also round church bells. And yet with all this the same writer, remarking on Welsh character, says, “What a difference between a Welshman and an Englishman of the lower class!” He had just been conversing with a miller’s man,—a working labourer in the lowliest walk of life; and found him conversant with the old poets, and the old traditions of the country, and quite interested in them; and he says, “What would a Suffolk miller’s man have said, if I had repeated to him verses out of Beowulf or even Chaucer, and had asked him about the residence of Skelton?” We must bear this in mind as we attempt to estimate the character with which the preacher had to deal. Haunted houses were numerous. A lonely old place, very distinct to the writer’s knowledge, had hung round it some wild traditions not unlike “Blind Willie’s Story” in “Redgauntlet.” No doubt, now, all these things have, to a considerable extent, disappeared,—although there are wild nooks, far wilder than any we have in England, where the faith in the old superstitions lingers. In the great preaching days, those men who shook the hearts of the thousands of their listeners, as they dealt with unseen terrors, believed themselves to be—as it was believed of them that they were—covered with the shadow of an Unseen Hand, and surrounded by the guardianship of the old Hebrew prophet—“chariots of fire, and horses of fire;” they believed themselves to be the care of a special Providence; and some of the stories then current would only move the contempt of that modern intelligence which has, at any rate, laid all the ghosts.