the swan-maiden, who ventured shyly in the fisher's path, was easily transformed into a loving wife; even the mara, most suspicious and terrible of ghostly visitors, has often laid aside her darker instincts, and developed into a cheerful spouse, with only a tinge of mystery to make her more attractive in her husband's eyes. Melusina combing her golden hair by the bubbling fountain of Lusignan, Undine playing in the rain-drenched forest, the nixie dancing at the village feast with her handsome Flemish lad, and the mermaid reluctantly leaving her watery home to wed the youth who captured her magic seal-skin, all belong to the sisterhood of beauty, and their images did good service in raising the vulgar mind from its enforced contemplation of the sordid troubles, the droning vexations, of life.
Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity delicious throbs of fear,—not craven cowardice, but that more refined and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling, the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought too
