was eating a cake while the masons were at work, the story goes, and it cried out, 'Mother, I see thee still;' then later, 'Mother, I see thee a little still;' and, as they put in the last stone, 'Mother, now I see thee no more.' The wall of Copenhagen, legend says, sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent little girl, set her on a chair at a table of toys and eatables, and, as she played and ate, twelve master-masons closed a vault over her; then, with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after. Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge of Arta, that fell in and fell in till they walled in the master-builder's wife, and she spoke her dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-stalk henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him in the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari); but, year after year, the demon (vila) razed by night what the three hundred masons built by day. The fiend must be appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three wives who should come bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers swore to keep the dreadful secret from their wives; but the two eldest gave traitorous warning to theirs, and it was the youngest brother's wife who came unsuspecting, and they built her in. But she entreated that an opening should be left for her to suckle her baby through, and for a twelve-month it was brought. To this day, Servian wives visit the tomb of the good mother, still marked by a stream of water which trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall. Lastly, there is our own legend of Vortigern, who could not finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a mother without a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of substitutes for such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and the churchyard in like manner handselled by burying a live horse first. In modern Greece an evident
