But to proceed. We can scarcely be surprised that lonely walks among the wild hills and cheerless moors of the North should be attended by superstitious fears, or that the strange unearthly cries, so like the yelping of dogs, uttered by wild fowl on their passage southwards, should engender a belief in a pack of spectral hounds. Wordsworth speaks of it in a sonnet, evidently connecting it with the German legend of the Wild Huntsman. He tells of a peasant, poor and aged, yet endowed—
With ample sovereignty of eye and ear;
Rich were his walks with supernatural cheer:
He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the seven whistlers on their nightly rounds,
And counted them! And oftentimes will start,
For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s hounds,
Doomed with their impious lord the flying hart
To chase for ever on aërial grounds.
In Devonshire the spectral pack is called the “Wisht hounds,” a name which Mr. Kelly derives from Wodin’s name, Wunsch, corrupted into “wisht.” It has a huntsman there who guides his pack over the wild wastes of Dartmoor; but I cannot hear of such a being in my own neighbourhood. The Gabriel hounds, as they call them in Durham and some parts of Yorkshire, are described as monstrous human-headed dogs, who traverse the air, and are often heard though seldom seen. Sometimes they appear to hang over a house, and then death or calamity are sure to visit it. A Yorkshire friend informs me that when a child was burned to death in Sheffield, a few years ago, the neighbours immediately called to mind how the Gabriel hounds had passed above the house not long before. From another quarter I hear of a person who was hastily summoned one night to the sick-bed of a relative whose illness had suddenly assumed an alarming character. As he set out he heard the wild sound of the creatures above his head; they accompanied him the whole way, about a mile, then paused, and yelped loudly over the house. He entered it, and found that the patient had just breathed her last.
