My friend, Miss Morris, lived when she was a young girl in Wales, and her father's house stood on a steep hill-side, with the village church just below, a short walk from the lodge gates. One Sunday evening, in winter, Miss Morris, her sister, and two maids walked down to the church to attend the six o'clock service. As they came out from the drive on to the road, they saw flickering down the hill in front of them, a pale bluish light, which, in the darkness, Miss Morris and her sister took to be a lantern carried by some church-goer like themselves, although they could see no figure of man or woman. The light stopped at the churchyard gate, and turned in, but Miss Morris observed that the person carrying it did not enter the church, but went on towards a grave with a tombstone. Now this grave happened to be the only one in the burying-ground, for the church had only lately been built, and the churchyard but newly consecrated. Arrived at the solitary tombstone, the light suddenly disappeared. The two girls went round to the same place, as their curiosity was roused by the light's disappearance, but there was nobody by the grave. Rather puzzled, they went into the church, where they had to wait some time for the service to begin, as the Vicar was very late. Afterwards he told Miss Morris that he had been detained at a cottage by a dying woman, who had begged him to stay with her till the end. When they returned home, the sisters told their mother of the light they had seen, and were promptly advised by her to speak to no one else on the subject, and to dismiss it from their minds as soon as possible. However, next day, as Miss Morris was passing the churchyard gate, she saw a brother of the deceased woman standing there with the Vicar, to whom he said: "My sister wished to be buried by the side of her friend, Sarah Jones." And the man then walked through the churchyard, _straight to the exact place by the tombstone_ where Miss Morris and her sister had seen the light disappear on the evening before.
Not long ago I was talking about the _canwyll corph_ and kindred subjects with the postmistress of a Cardiganshire village, who remarked that she had only known one person who had ever seen a "corpse-light." This was a woman--now dead--called Mary Jones, and to use the words of the postmistress "a very religious and respectable person." At one time in her life she lived in a village called Pennant (its real name), a place well known to me, where the church is rather a landmark, being set on top of a hill. Mary Jones invariably and solemnly declared that whenever a death occurred among her neighbours, she would always previously see a corpse-candle wend its way up the hill from the village to the churchyard. And at the same place she once saw the Toili (a phantom funeral). This last experience was in broad daylight, and was shared with several other people who were haymaking at the time, and who all saw clearly the spectral procession appear along a road and mysteriously vanish when it reached a certain point. But we will speak of the Toili presently.