Once more, we often read in the Sagas of a hero like Grettir, who opens a howe, has a conflict with a “barrow-wight,” as Mr. Morris calls the “howe-dweller,” and wins gold and weapons. But the dweller in the howe is often merely the able-bodied ghost of the Norseman, a known and named character, who is buried there; he is not a Pecht. Thus, as it seems to me, the Scotch and Celts possessed a theory of a legendary people, as did the Greeks. Whether any actual traditions of an earlier, perhaps a Finnish race, was at the bottom of the legend, is an obscure question. But, having such a belief, the Scotch easily discovered homes for the fancied people in the sepulchral howes: they “combined their information.” The Fairies, again, are composite creatures. As they came to births and christenings, and as Norse wise-wives (as in the Saga of Eric the Red) prophesied at festivals, Mr. MacRitchie combines his own information. The Wise-wife is a Finn woman, and Finn and Fairy amalgamate. But the Egyptians, as in the _Tale of Two Brothers_ (Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_), had their Hathors, who came and prophesied at births; the Greeks had their Mœræ, as in the story of Meleager and the burning brand. The Hathors and Mœræ play, in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, the part of Fairies at the christening, but surely they were not Finnish women! In short, though a memory of some old race may have mingled in the composite Fairy belief, this is at most but an element in the whole, and the part played by ancestral spirits, naturally earth-dwellers, is probably more important. Bishop Callaway has pointed out, in the preface to his _Zulu Tales_, that what the Highlanders say of the Fairies the Zulus say of “the Ancestors.” In many ways, as when persons carried off to Fairyland meet relations or friends lately deceased, who warn them, as Persephone and Steenie Steenson were warned, to eat no food in this place, Fairyland is clearly a memory of the pre-Christian Hades. There are other elements in the complex mass of Fairy tradition, but Chaucer knew “the Fairy Queen Proserpina,” as Campion calls her, and it is plain that in very fact “the dread Persephone,” the “Queen over death and the dead,” had dwindled into the lady who borrows Tamlane in the ballad. Indeed Kirk mentions but does not approve of this explanation, “that those subterranean people are departed souls.” Now, as was said, the dead are dwellers under earth. The worshippers of Chthonian Demeter (Achaia) beat the earth with wands; so does the Zulu sorcerer when he appeals to the Ancestors. And a Macdonald in Moidart, being pressed for his rent, beat the earth, and cried aloud to his dead chief, “Simon, hear me; you were always good to me.”[3] IV. FAIRYLAND AND HADES.