"Why are you standing there, my dear daughter? Where are your brothers and sisters?" The daughter knew her not. She said her mother was fair and blithe, her face was white and pink. "How can I be fair and blithe? I am dead, my face is pale. How can I be white and pink, when I have been all this time in my winding-sheet?" Answering thus, the mother hastened to her little children's chamber. She found them with tears running down their cheeks. She brushed the clothes of one, she tidied the hair of the second, she lifted the third from the floor, she comforted the fourth, the fifth she set on her knee as though she were fain to suckle it. To the eldest girl she said, "Go and tell Dyring to come here." And when he came she cried in wrath, "I left you ale and bread, and my little ones hunger; I left you blue cushions, and my little ones lie on straw; I left you waxen candles, and my little ones are in the dark. Woe betide you, if there be cause I should return again! Behold the red cock crows, the dead fly underground. Behold the black cock crows, heaven's doors are thrown wide. Behold the white cock crows, I must begone." So saying she went, and was seen no more. Ever after that night each time Dyring and his wife heard the dogs bark they gave the children ale and bread; each time they heard the dogs bay they were seized with dread of the dead woman; each time they heard the dogs howl they trembled lest she should come back. Two universal beliefs are introduced into this variant: the disappearance of the dead at cock crow, and the connection of the howling of dogs with death or the dead. The last is a superstition which still obtains a wide acceptance even among educated people. I was speaking of it lately to an English officer, who stated that he had twice heard the death howl, once while on duty in Ireland, and once, if I remember right, in India. It was, he said, totally unlike any other noise produced by a dog. I observed that all noises sound singular when the nerves are strained by painful expectancy; but he answered that in his own case his feelings were not involved, as the death which occurred, in one instance at least, was that of a perfect stranger.