vanish, but presently appear again. If a little candle is seen of a pale bluish colour, then follows the corpse of an infant; if a larger one, then the corpse of some one come to age. If two candles come from different places and be seen to meet, the corpses will do the same; and if any of these candles be seen to turn aside through some bypath leading to the church, the following corpse will be found to take exactly the same way. The belief in Devonshire is very much the same as that in Wales, only it is held that no corpse-candle will come to fetch a soul unless there be a kinsman already interred in the churchyard.
That there may be an amount of gas that is luminous escaping from a tomb is possible enough. I had one night dining with me friend who is now a vice-principal of a college in Oxford. To reach his home he had to pass our churchyard, and he came back in terror as he had seen a blue light dancing above a grave. But that these flames should travel down roads and seek houses where there is on dying is, of course, an exaggeration and untenable.
Baxter tells the story of what happened at Llangatten in Carmarthenshire:—
