1882.] 
Will-o' -the -Wisp : a Confession . 
449 
but I knew where I was, and went straight for home, half 
dead with fear. Never again would I go to that blacksmith’s 
of an evening.’ 
44 4 If he had not kept his foot in the rut,’ broke in the old 
woman, his wife, 4 it might have been all over with him. 
When a Jack-o’-Lantern gets you in the water, then he 
sniggers ; he laughs, you know. I’ve heard my father say 
that scores of times.’ 
44 Thus we see the old woman brought forward the testi- 
mony of her father also, with respedl to the traditional shady 
character of the Jack-o’-Lantern, or Will-o’-the-Wisp, or 
Ignis fatuus. 
44 4 You call the Jack-o’-Lantern he,* I said. 4 You talk as 
if you thought it knew what it was about ; and by luring 
you into danger it had an objedl in view, and not a good 
one.’ 4 Just so,’ said the old man. I said I was inclined to 
agree with him. 
44 On the man’s assenting to the woman’s assertion that 
4 when a Jack-o’-Lantern gets you into the water, then he 
laughs,’ I pressed the question, 4 Do you really mean to say 
that they are really heard to laugh — that they make the 
noise of laughter?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. 4 But how,’ I 
rejoined, 4 can people know that they laugh when those who 
are led by them get drowned, and do not live to tell it ? ’ ” 
It is curious that 44 Miror ” speaks of this his own objec- 
tion — fatal, as it appears to us — as 44 rather lame special 
pleading on my part.” It must not be forgotten that the 
occurrence is said to have taken place at Purbeck. Now in 
the counties of Dorset and Wilts the tendency to personifi- 
cation is very strong, and the country people speak of many 
things as 44 he ” which in the Metropolitan District and the 
Northern Counties are always referred to as 44 it.” 
A very full and definite account of the appearance of an 
Ignis fatuus is to be met with in a modern work* reviewed 
in our current issue. Some passages of Mr. White’s nar- 
rative we quote. The inhabitants of Itapua, a small town 
in the La Plata States, situate on the River Parana, were 
during the author’s stay alarmed by 44 a mysterious light 
that appeared almost every night in the second plaza, situ- 
ated on the high river banks, but where, nevertheless, the 
ground was in some parts a temporary swamp, from the 
rains settled in the hollows. In this plaza were posted the 
line soldiers’ barracks, and to the guard bivouacking round 
* Cameos from the Silver Land, by E. W. White, F.Z.S, London : Van 
Voorst. Vol. ii., p. 447. 
