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It is a white straw sailor, with a turned-up brim, a blue ribbon encircling the crown, and a white elastic under the chin; such a hat as you would expect to see crowning the flaxen curls of mother's darling boy of four. I love to look at the gondola, with its solemn caracoling like that of a possible water-horse, of which the arched neck is the graceful ferro.
Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden.
Not only in Ireland is faery belief still extant. It was only the other day I heard of a Scottish farmer who believed that the lake in front of his house was haunted by a water-horse. He was afraid of it, and dragged the lake with nets, and then tried to pump it empty. It would have been a bad thing for the water-horse had he found him.
The horse had given trouble and ended by kicking the trap to pieces, and they had to walk part of the way home. Quite simple, you see; but the first opportunity I looked in a mirror to see if my hair had not turned white in a single night, as men's have done through sudden fear. It hadn't; but I did dream of a water-horse with "an awful starin' white face." This morning Mrs.
That same night, as Hester was sitting beside him, she heard him talking in his sleep: "When may I go and play with the rest by the river? Oh, how sweetly it talks! it runs all through me and through me! It was such a nice way, God, of fetching me home! I rode home on a water-horse!" He thought he was dead; that God had sent for him home; that he was now safe, only tired.
The water-bulls are described as being friendly to man; the water-horses are dangerous when men get upon their backs they are carried off and drowned. Sometimes the water-horse takes the shape of a man. Here is a story of this kind from the island of Islay: There was a farmer who had a great many cattle.
Ian in imagination saw it, too. They sat, chin on knees, upon the moorside above the Kelpie's Pool. The water was faintly crisped, the reeds and willow boughs just stirred. "But the kelpie did you ever see that?" "Sometimes it is seen as a water-horse, sometimes as a demon. I never saw anything like that but once. I never told any one about it.
The mistress and the young gentleman has never come in, and the master says to me, 'Fetch me my flask, Anne, says he; and fetch it I did, and he drove away, an' I'm sure as I'm sittin' here I didn't see the water-horse for nothing. What does a flask mean but an accident? Och och, and a nice laughin'-faced young gentleman he was, too."
So he laid his head upon her knees, and she began to arrange his hair. Presently she got a great fright, for amongst the hair she found a great quantity of water-weed; and she knew that it was a transformed water-horse. Like a brave girl she did not cry out, but went on dressing the man's hair until he fell asleep.
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