'Th' Gabriel Ratchets' strike terror into the heart of many a moorland dweller in Lancashire and Yorkshire still, presaging, as they are believed to do, death or sorrow to every one who is so unfortunate as to hear them. In the popular idea they are a pack of dogs yelping through the air. Our old literature has many references to the superstition. In more recent days, Wordsworth has introduced it in one of his sonnets:--
'And oftentimes will start-- For overhead are sweeping GABRIEL'S HOUNDS.'
Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in a poem dated 1849, in his _Isles of Loch Awe and other Poems_, which he has kindly given me permission to quote here, says of them,--
'Faintly sounds the airy note, And the deepest bay from the staghound's throat, Like the yelp of a cur, on the air doth float, And hardly heard is the wild halloo.'
'They fly on the blast of the forest That whistles round the withered tree, But where they go we may not go, Nor see them as they fly.'
Mr. Hamerton, however, goes beyond the Lancashire peasant, at any rate so far as I have been able to ascertain, for I never met any one in the hill country or on the moorlands of the North who fancied that the throng included anything but _Ratchets_, _i.e._ dogs, for the poet goes on to sing--
'Hark! 'tis the goblin of the wood Rushing down the dark hill-side, With steeds that neigh and hounds that bay.'
Mr. Henderson has recorded that, about Leeds, the flight is supposed to be that of 'the souls of unbaptized children doomed to flit restlessly above their parents' abode.' In Germany, certainly the Wild Hunt or Furious Host is accompanied by unbaptized children, and it has been recorded that a woman, about the year 1800, died of grief upon learning that the Furious Host had passed over the village where her still-born child had died just before. Mr. Kelly (_Indo-European Tradition_) very ably and poetically resolves all the various superstitions of this Wild Hunt into figurative descriptions of natural phenomena, but Mr. Yarrell, the distinguished naturalist, reduces the cries of the Gabriel Hounds into the whistling of the Bean Goose, _Anser Segetum_, as the flocks are flying southward in the night, migrating from Scandinavia.