order to keep up the ocean overhead;[36] but the plate was
full of little windows, which were opened whenever it became
necessary to let the rain come through.[37] With equal
plausibility the Greek represented the rainy sky as a sieve in
which the daughters of Danaos were vainly trying to draw
water; while to the Hindu the rain-clouds were celestial
cattle milked by the wind-god. In primitive Aryan lore, the
sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing
over it; and an English legend tells how one of these ships
once caught its anchor on a gravestone in the churchyard, to
the great astonishment of the people who were coming out of
church. Charon's ferry-boat was one of these vessels, and
another was Odin's golden ship, in which the souls of slain
heroes were conveyed to Valhalla. Hence it was once the
Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and in
Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse,
that it may have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly
ferryman.[38] In such a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on
her fatal voyage; and of similar nature was the dusky barge,
"dark as a funeral-scarf from stem to stern," in which Arthur
was received by the black-hooded queens.[39]

[33] "Saga me forwhan byth seo sunne read on aefen? Ic the
secge, forthon heo locath on helle.--Tell me, why is the sun
red at even? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell."
Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 115, apud Tylor, Primitive
Culture, Vol. II. p. 63. Barbaric thought had partly
anticipated my childish theory.

[34] "Still in North Germany does the peasant say of thunder,