The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as the origin of those countless mediæval legends of the earthly Paradise: doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the Phæaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia--evidently in reality our island--which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this he tells the following strange story:--There is, he declares, an island called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into two divisions by a wall;[28] and on one side of this wall the air is healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation; when the man's night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the opposite side--our coast--the fishermen heard names called over and voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then, when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus landing at Ithaca.