Fairy Tales, Now First Collected/Tale 3

by Joseph Ritson

TALE III.

THE ANTIPODES.

In Great Britain is a castle situate among certain mountains, to which the people have given the name of Bech. Its wall is hardly assailable, and in the mountain the cavern of a hole, which as a pipe of the winds, most powerfully belches for the time. Whence so great a wind proceeds, people are astonished; and among a great many things, which are carried about there with admiration, I received from the most religious man, Robert prior of Renildewlt, thence sprung, that when a certain noble man William Peverell, possessed the aforesaid castle, with the adjacent barony, a man, truly, brave and powerful, and abounding in divers animals: upon a certain day his swineherd, as he was negligent about the service committed to him, lost a pregnant sow, of the kind of those which bring forth pigs, rather fruitful. Fearing, therefore, by reason of the loss the bitter words of the lords vicar, he thought within himself, if, perchance, by any accident that sow had entered the famous hole of Bech, but until those times inscrutable. He questioned, in his mind, how he should make himself the thorough-searcher of the secret place. He entered the cavern in a time then tranquil from all wind, and when he had proceeded a long way, at length he came by chance from darkness into a lucid place, opening into a spacious plain of fields. Having entered the land widely cultivated, he found persons collecting mature fruits, and, among the standing corn, he recognized the sow, which had multiplied from herself sucking pigs. Then the swineherd, being astonished, and rejoicing at his 'recovered' loss, received the sow, and dismissed with joy, led her to the herd of swine.^[1]

1. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, apud Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium, à Leibnitz, 1, 975.