SUPERSTITION IN DECLINE. 127 



is not to be found a choir of insect musicians whose dirge-like 

 strains are well suited to the departing year ; each with an 

 appropriate accompaniment of gloomy or boding sounds, 

 audible, perhaps, only to the mental ear, yet with power suffi- 

 cient to get up a dance, not of life, but of death, to set in 

 motion a train of shadowy phantoms, which take hands, and 

 foot it, not, " featly," but with due solemnity. 



It must be owned, however, that such mortuary music, of 

 which the key-note may be struck even by an insect or a bird, 

 is getting out of date, having had its day more properly its 

 night with all but very children, infant or adult. Supersti- 

 tion, after scaring good and bad, high and low, for centuries, 

 has, in these modern days, been scared herself by the advanc- 

 ing daylight of science. From baronial hall, and turret cham- 

 ber, and gloomy corridor, and winding stair, she has de- 

 scended to the cottage, or been kicked down to kitchen and 

 kitchen company ; and even here begins to totter, sore buffet- 

 ed by missiles from the penny press. Showing symptoms of 

 age as well as degradation, the hearing and sight of her anti- 

 quated ladyship have grown dull, ceasing, as of yore, to mag- 

 nify the volume and the import of boding sounds, with their 

 awful phantasmagoria of shadowy shapes. But before both 

 Superstition, and the performance of which she was once 

 the frequent getter-up, quite sink for ever from their last 

 and lowest stages into the pit of oblivion, let us just take 

 a passing look at the giant terrors which even insect dirge- 



