Harmless _genii_ however are more frequently assigned to churches, exercising a kind of wardenship over them and taking an interest in the parishioners. At Marousi, a village near Athens, there is a church which is still believed to have a _genius_, in the form of a bull, lurking in its foundations; and when any parishioner is about to die, the bull is heard to bellow three times at midnight. A church in Athens used to claim the same distinction, and the bellowing of the bull there is said to have been heard within living memory at the death of an old man named Lioules[691]. Other churches also in Athens, not to be outdone, pretended to the possession of _genii_ in the shapes of a snake, a black cock, and a woman, who all followed the bull’s example and emitted their appropriate cries thrice at midnight as a presage of similar events[692]. Why the _genii_ of churches in particular appear mostly as bulls, I cannot determine. When the _genius_ of a river manifests itself in that form, the connexion with antiquity is obvious; for river-gods, who _ex vi termini_ are the _genii_ of the rivers whose name they share, were constantly pourtrayed of old in the form of bulls. All that can be said is that the type of _genius_ is old, though its localisation is new and difficult to explain. The _genii_ of bridges cannot properly, I suppose, be distinguished from the _genii_ of those rivers or ravines which the bridges span. They are usually depicted as dragons or other formidable monsters, and they are best known for the cruel toll which they exact when the bridge is a-building. The original conception is doubtless that of the river-god demanding a sacrifice, even of human life, in compensation for men’s encroachment upon his domain. The most famous of the folk-songs which celebrate such a theme is associated with ‘the Bridge of Arta,’ but many versions[693] of it have been published from different districts, and in some the names of other bridges are substituted; in Crete the story is attached to the ‘shaking bridge’ over a mountain torrent near Canea[694]; in the Peloponnese to ‘the Lady’s bridge’ over the river Ladon[695]; in the neighbourhood of Thermopylae to a bridge over the river Helláda[696]; in the island of Cos to the old bridge of Antimachia[697]. The song, in the version[698] which I select, runs thus: