heaven if I cannot hunt there.” When she died, therefore, her spirit was cursed with an everlasting compulsion to slake this most dear desire. She had to hunt eternally with the hounds of the underworld. When she heard “Caradoc’s Hunt” she could not but start or follow the chase. “If I forget ‘Caradoc’s Hunt,’ then I shall be dead indeed,” she said. “I shall be quiet and sleepy as anyone else among the ghosts.” When men saw her dark eyes flashing at thought of the song they could not believe that if anything of this beautiful creature was to survive the immortal remnant would not take with it “Caradoc’s Hunt.” She heard it at many different and some monstrous times. People thought that the tune was in her head, but she averred that she heard it outside--in the clouds or the trees or the hallooing woods--and her immediate attendants knew this to be true. She would break away from marriage or funeral to ride. She would suddenly rise up from mass to mount. She would dress at dead of night, uncouple the hounds, and hunt alone. Love, wine, sleep, religion were impotent against the melody. Everyone admitted that it was a beautiful melody; they called it gay, or spirited, or said that it was perfectly suitable to a knightly company of riders. This lady heard it and rode away. Hers was not the fate of the lord of Radnor Castle. He and his hounds impiously passed the night in the church of Llan-Avan, near Builth, to be near the day’s coverts early; but when he rose at the dawn he found himself blinded and his hounds mad, so that he escaped only with difficulty, to earn pardon by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The lady’s life was charmed. She rode anywhere without fear. She died young, but it was in bed. On horseback she could defy man or God. Such was the Lady of the Night, and her legend was at least not unworthy of “Caradoc’s Hunt.” But as the belief in the hounds of the underworld is earlier than the Middle Ages and the ghostly hunter in darkness more venerable than the Norman lady, so is the tune. The legend might have grown to explain the tune, and it does help to illuminate the depths of which the surviving words, the mere cheerful chivalry, are no more than the glancing surface. But the tune has depth under depth, and when it is heard the plummet of the soul sinks to a profound far below the region of the lady who rides by night. What darkness the plummet fathoms, what “bottom of the monstrous world” it touches, is not to be understood. Perhaps the mystery is only that which at once haloes and enshrouds common things when we no longer feel them as common. But if at the sounding of the melody the mind’s eye still sees a cavalcade of antique hunters, it is not stag or boar or questing beast that they are to follow; the castle that sends them out of its gates and may receive them at nightfall is no feudal or faery stronghold, but an image, perhaps, of the great world itself. [Illustration: The Blowingstone.]