112 Wild Life in a Southern County. 
The carters have a story about horses which had 
spent the night in a meadow being found the next 
morning in a state of exhaustion, as if they had been 
ridden furiously during the hours of darkness. They 
were totally unfit for work next day. Instances are 
even given where men have hidden ina tree with a 
gun, and when the horses began to gallop fired at 
something indistinct sitting on their haunches, which 
something at once disappeared, and the excitement 
ceased. But these things are said to have happened 
a long time ago. 
So, also, there is a memory of a man digging stone 
in a quarry and distinctly hearing the strokes of a 
pick beneath him. When he wheeled. his barrow the 
subterranean quarryman wheeled his, and shortly 
after he had shot the stones out there came a rumbling 
from below as if the other barrow had been emptied. 
The very quarry is pointed out where this extra- 
ordinary phenomenon took place. It is curious how a 
story of this kind, something like which is, I think, 
told of the Hartz Mountains, should have got local- 
ised in a limestone quarry so far apart in distance 
and character. How well I remember the ancient 
labourer who told me this legend as a boy! It is 
easy to philosophise on it now, and speculate upon the 
genesis of the tale, which may have originated in a 
cavernous hollow resounding to the tools; but then it 
was a reality, and I recollect always giving a wide 
berth to that quarry at night. As the old man told 
