“Of which remark here made that ‘_the ghost doth walk_,’” comments the sage Flaxius, “when money is forbidden unto man (which is so commonly heard in theatrical circles when the weekly salary is not paid), I have no doubt that it comes from the many ancient legends which assign a jealous guardian sprite to every hoard. And thus in Spenser’s wondrous ‘Faerie Queene’ the marvellous stores in Mammon’s treasury, ‘embost with massy gold of glorious guifte,’ were watched by “‘An ugly feend more fowle than dismall day; The which with monstrous stalk behind him stept, And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.’ “The which quotation is in its turn otherwise curious since it gave, I doubt not, the original suggestion to Coleridge of the verse wherein mention is made in simile of one who walks in tear and dread, and dares not turn his head— “‘For well he knows a griesly fiend Doth close behind him tread.’ “‘More or less accurately, my masters, more or less.’ ‘’Tis sixty years since’—I read the original.” THE SPIRIT OF THE PORTA SAN GALLO “And both the undying fish that swim Through Bowscale Tarn did wait on him: The pair were servants of his eye In their immortality; They moved about in open sight, To and fro, for his delight.” —WORDSWORTH, _Poems of the Imagination_. The reader should never at once infer that a legend is recent because it is attached to a new place. Spirits and traditions are like the goblin of Norse tale, who moved with the family. The family changed its home to get rid of him, but on the way the elf popped his head out and remarked, “_Wi flütten_” (“We’re flitting” or moving). The ghost of Benjamin Franklin long haunted the library which he had founded in Philadelphia, and when the library or books were transferred to a new building, the ghost went with them and his statue. And in like manner the legend of the religious person, male or female, who is also a _fish_ has travelled over many lands, till it came to the _vasca_ or basin of the Porto San Gallo. Thus Leonard Vair, in his charming _Trois Livres des Charmes_, _Sorcelages ou Enchantemens_, Paris, 1583, tells us that “there is a cloister in Burgundy, by which there is a pond, and in this pond are as many fish as there be monks in the cloister. And when one of the fish swims on the surface of the water and beats with its tail, then one of the monks is ever ill.” But there is a mass of early Christian or un-Christian folklore which identifies “Catholic clergy-women” with fish, even as Quakers are identified in Philadelphia with shad. In Germany all maids just in their teens are called _Backfisch_, that is, pan-fish or _fritures_, from their youth and liveliness, or delicacy. We may read in Friedrich that the fish is a common Christian symbol of immortality, which fully accounts for all legends of certain of them living for ever. The story which I have to tell is as follows:—