Near the top of it is a cave, containing, it is _said_, a chest of
money,--a great iron chest, _so_ full, that when the sun shines bright
upon it, the gold can be seen through the key-hole; but it has never yet
been stolen, because, in the first place, a huge black cat (and wherever
a black cat is there is mischief, you may be sure) guards the treasure,
which bristles up, and, fixing a _gashful_ gaze on the would-be
marauder, with fiery eyes, seems ready to devour him if he approach
within a dozen yards of the cave; and, secondly, whenever this creature
is off guard, (and it has occasionally been seen in a neighbouring
village,) and the treasure has been attempted to be withdrawn from its
tomb, no mortal rope has been able to sustain its weight, each that has
been tried invariably breaking when the coffer was at the very mouth of
the cave; which, being endowed with the gift of locomotion, has
immediately retrograded into its pristine situation! I have mentioned
this tradition, as it was told to me, because it is so curiously
coincident with the German superstition of treasure buried within the
Hartz mountains, guarded, and ever disappointing the cupidity of those
who would discover and possess themselves of it.


_Fairy Loaves._

Being lately in Norfolk, I discovered that the rustics belonging to the
part of it in which I was staying, particularly regarded a kind of
fossil-stone, which much resembled a sea-egg petrified, and was found
frequently in the flinty gravel of that county. They esteemed such
stones sacred to the elfin train, and termed them fairy loaves,
forbearing to touch them, lest misfortunes should come upon them for the
sacrilege. An old woman told me, that as she was trudging home one night
from her field-work, she took up one of these fossils, and was going to