In a letter from the late Mr. Holland, of Sheffield, dated March 28, 1861, is the following mention of this wild hunt, with a sonnet by him, embodying local feelings on the subject: “I can never forget the impression made upon my own mind when once arrested by the cry of these Gabriel hounds as I passed the parish church of Sheffield, one densely dark and very still night. The sound was exactly like the questing of a dozen beagles on the foot of a race, but not so loud, and highly suggestive of ideas of the supernatural.
“Oft have I heard my honoured mother say,
How she has listened to the Gabriel hounds—
Those strange unearthly and mysterious sounds,
Which on the ear through murkiest darkness fell;
And how, entranced by superstitious spell,
The trembling villager not seldom heard,
In the quaint notes of the nocturnal bird,
Of death premonished, some sick neighbour’s knell.
I, too, remember once at midnight dark,
How these sky-yelpers startled me, and stirred
My fancy so, I could have then averred
A mimic pack of beagles low did bark.
Nor wondered I that rustic fear should trace
A spectral huntsman doomed to that long moonless chase.”
We have the authority of the distinguished ornithologist, Mr. Yarrell,[1] for stating the birds in question to be bean-geese, coming southwards in large flocks on the approach of winter, partly from Scotland and its islands, but chiefly from Scandinavia. They choose dark nights for their migration, and utter a loud and very peculiar cry. It has been observed in every part of England—in Norfolk, in Gloucestershire, and as far west as Cornwall. A gentleman was riding alone near the Land’s End on a still dark night, when the yelping cry broke out above his head so suddenly, and to all appearance so near, that he instinctively pulled up his horse as if to allow the pack to pass, the animal trembling violently at the unexpected sounds.
Mr. Buckland[2] has reported portents of a somewhat similar
