[21] A Tag-mahd, or ‘day’s mowing,’ is a regular land measure in North Tirol.
[22] There is no record of her summit ever having been attained before the successful ascent of Herr Grohmann, in 1864. Mr. Tucker, an Englishman, accomplished it the next year.
[23] I have given some of the most curious of these in a collection of Household Stories from the Land of Hofer.
[24] There is no tradition more universally spread over Tirol than that which tells of judgments falling on non-observers of days of rest. They are, however, by no means confined to Tirol. Ludovic Lalanne, Curiosités des Traditions, vol. iv. p. 136, says that the instances he had collected showed it was treated as a fault most grievous to heaven. ‘Matthieu Paris, à l’année 1200, raconte qu’une pauvre blanchisseuse ayant osé travailler un jour de fête fut punie d’ une étrange façon; un cochon de lait tout noir s’attacha à sa mamelle gauche.’ He relates one or two other curious instances—one of a young girl who, having insisted on working on a holiday, somehow got the knot of her thread twisted into her tongue, and every attempt to remove it gave intolerable pain. Ultimately she was healed by praying at the Lady-altar at Noyon, and here the knot of thread was long shown in the sacristy.
I well remember the English counterpart in my own nursery. There were, indeed, two somewhat analogous stories; and I often wondered, without exactly daring to ask, why there was so much difference in the tone in which they were told, for the one seemed to me as good as the other. The first, which used to be treated as an utter imposture, was that a woman and her son surreptitiously obtained a consecrated wafer for purposes of incantation (we have had a Tirolean counterpart of this at Sistrans, supra pp. 221–2), and in pursuit of their weird operation had pierced it, when there flowed thereout such a prodigious stream of blood that the whole place was inundated, and all the people drowned. The second, which was told with something of seriousness in it, (‘and they say, mind you, that actually happened,’) was of a young lady who, having persisted in working on Sunday in spite of all her nurse’s injunctions, pricked her finger. No one could stop the bleeding that ensued, and she bled to death for a judgment; and whether it was true or not, there was a monument to her in Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley, who seems to have missed nothing that could possibly be said about the Abbey, finds place, I see, to notice even this tradition (pp. 219–20 and note), and identifies it with the monument of Elizabeth Russell (born 1575) in St. Edmund’s Chapel. Madame Parkes-Belloc tells me she has often seen a wax figure of a lady (in the costume of two centuries later than Elizabeth Russell) under a glass case in Gosfield Hall, Essex (formerly a seat of the Buckingham family), of which a similar tradition is told.
CHAPTER XII.
WÄLSCH-TIROL.
VAL SUGANA.—GIUDICARIA.—FOLKLORE.
Legends are echoes of the great child-voices from the primitive world; so rich and sweet that their sound is gone out into all lands.