I.

Of spectral animals there is no great diversity in Cambria, unless one should class under this head sundry poetic creatures which more properly belong to the domain of magic, or to fairyland. The spirits of favourite animals which have died return occasionally to visit their masters. Sometimes it is a horse, which is seen on a dark night looking in at the window, its eyes preternaturally large. More often it is the ghost of a dog which revisits the glimpses of the moon. Men sometimes become as fondly attached to a dog as they could to any human being, and, where the creed of piety is not too severe, the possibility of a dog's surviving after death in a better world is admitted. 'It is hard to look in that dog's eyes and believe,' said a Welshman to me, 'that he has not a bit of a soul to be saved.' The almost human companionship of the dog for man is a familiar fact. It is not strange, therefore, that the dog should be the animal whose spirit, in popular belief, shares the nature of man's after death.