In Ireland we meet with similar ideas. On the death of Laeghaire (King Lear), his body was carried to Tara and interred with his arms and cuirass, and with his face turned towards his enemies, as if still threatening them. Eoghan, King of Connaught, was so buried in Sligo, and as long as his dead head looked towards Ulster, the Connaught men were victorious; so the Ulster men disinterred him and buried him face downwards, and then gained the victory. According to Welsh tradition, the head of Bran was buried with the face to France, so that no invasion could come from thence. A Welsh story says that the son of Lear bade his companions cut off his head, take it to the White Hill in London, and bury it there, with the face directed towards France. The head of man and beast, when cut off, was thought to be gifted with oracular powers, and the piping of the wind in the skulls over the house gables was interpreted--as he who consulted it desired. In an account we have of the Wends in the fifteenth century, we are told that they set up the heads of horses and cows on stakes above their stables to drive away disease from their cattle, and they put the skull of a horse under the fodder in the manger to scare away the hobgoblins who ride horses at night. In Holland, horses’ heads are hung up over pigstyes, and in Mecklenburg they are placed under the pillows of the sick to drive away fever. It must be remembered that pest or fever was formerly, and is still among the superstitious Slaves, held to be a female deity or spirit of evil. Now we can understand whence came the headless horses, so common in superstition, as premonitions of death. Sometimes a horse is heard galloping along a road or through a street. It is seen to be headless. It stops before a door, or it strikes the door with its hoof. That is a sure death token. The reader may recall Albert Dürer’s engraving of the white horse at a door, waiting for the dead soul to mount it, that it may bear him away to the doleful realms of Hæla. In Denmark and North Germany the “Hell-horse” is well known. It has three legs, and is not necessarily headless. It looks in at a window and neighs for a soul to mount it. The image of Death on the Pale Horse in the Apocalypse was not unfamiliar to the Norse and German races. They knew all about Odin’s white horse that conveyed souls to the drear abode. Properly, every village, every house had its own hell-horse. Indeed, it was not unusual to bury a live horse in a churchyard, to serve the purpose of conveying souls. A vault was recently opened in a church at Görlitz, which was found to contain a skeleton of a horse only, and this church and yard had long been believed to be haunted by a hell-horse. The horse whose head was set up over the gable of a house was the domestic spirit of the family, retained to carry the souls away.