nt lore there is the breath of mighty forests, of marsh
lands and of Nature in her wildest. We are swept back to an epoch when
man fought with Nature, wresting from her the land, and when the
unseen powers of evil resented this conquest of their domains. To the
early Saxons those unseen powers were an everyday reality. A
supernatural terror brooded over the trackless heaths, the dark mere
pools were inhabited by the water elves. In the wreathing mists and
driving storms of snow and hail they saw the uncouth "moor gangers,"
"the muckle mark steppers who hold the moors," or the stalking fiends
of the lonely places, creatures whose baleful eyes shone like flames
through the mist. To this day some of our place names in the more
remote parts of these islands recall the memory of those evil terrors.
In these manuscripts we are again in an atmosphere of eotens and
trolls, there are traces of even older terrors, when the first Teuton
settlers in Europe struggled with the aborigines who lived in caves,
hints as elusive as the phantom heroes in the Saxon poems, and as
unforgettable.

Still more remarkable is the fact that beneath the superstructure of
Christian rites to be used when the herbs were being picked or
administered we find traces not merely of the ancient heathen
religion, but of a religion older than that of Woden. It has been
emphasised by our most eminent authorities that in very early times
our ancestors had but few chief gods, and it is a remarkable fact that
there is no mention whatever of Woden in the whole range of Saxon
literature before the time of Alfred. In those earlier centuries they
seem to have worshipped a personification of Heaven, and Earth, the
wife of Heaven, and the Son, whom after ages called Thor. There were
also Nature deities, Hrede, the personification of the brightness of
Summer, and Eostra, the radiant creature of the Dawn. It will be
remembered that it was the worship, not of Balder, but of Eostra,
which the Christian missionaries found so deeply imbedded that they
adopted her name and transferred it to Easter. For this we have the
authority of Bede. Separate from these beneficent powers were the
destroying and harmful powers of Nature--darkness, storm, frost and
the deadly vapours of moorland and fen, personified in the giants, the
ogres, the furious witches that rode the winds and waves; in fact, the
whole horde of demons of sea and land and sky. It is the traces of
these most ancient f