The influence of death on the popular imagination is shown in those ballads of the supernatural of which folk-poetry offers so great an abundance as to make choice difficult. One of the most powerful as well as the most widely diffused of the people's ghost stories is that which treats of the persecuted child whose mother comes out of her grave to succour him. There are two or three variants of this among the Czech songs. A child aged eighteen months loses his mother. As soon as he is old enough to understand about such things, he asks his father what he has done with her? "Thy mother sleeps a heavy sleep, no one will wake her; she lies in the graveyard hard by the gate." When the child hears that, he runs to the graveyard. He loosens the earth with a big pin and pushes it aside with his little finger. Then he cries mournfully, "Ah! mother, little mother, say one little word to me!" "My child, I cannot," the mother replies, "my head is weighed down with clay; on my heart is a stone which burns like fire; go home little one, there you have another mother." "Ah!" rejoins he, "she is not good like you were. When she gives me bread she turns it thrice; when you gave it me you spread it with butter. When she combs my hair she makes my head bleed; when you combed my hair, mother, you fondled it. When she bathes my feet she bruises them against the side of the basin; when you bathed them you kissed them. When she washes my shirt she loads me with curses; you used to sing whilst you washed." The mother answers: "Go back to the house, my child, to-morrow I will come for you." The child goes back to the house and lies down in his bed. "Ah! father, my little father, make ready my winding-sheet, my soul now belongs to God, my body to the grave, to the grave near my mother--how glad her heart will be!" One day he was ill, the second he died, the third day they buried him. The effect is heightened by the interval placed between the mother's death and the child's awakening to his own forlorn condition. When the mother died he was too young to think or to grieve. He did not know that she was gone until he missed her. Only by degrees, after years of harsh treatment, borne with the patience of a child or a dumb animal, he began to feel intuitively rather than to remember that it had not been always so--that he had once been loved. Then, going straight to the point with the terrible accusative power that lies in children, he said to the father, "What have you done with my mother?" He had been able to live and to suffer until he was old enough to think; when he thought, he died. Here we have an instance, one of the many that exist, of a motive which, having recurred again and again in folk-poetry, gets handled at last by a master-poet, who gives it enduring shape and immortality. Victor Hugo may or may not have known the popular legend. It is most likely that he did not know it. Yet, stripped of the marvellous, and modified