"And both the undying fish that swim
Through Bowscale Tarn did wait on him:
The pair were servants of his eye
In their immortality;
They moved about in open sight,
To and fro, for his delight."
--WORDSWORTH, _Poems of the Imagination_.
The reader should never at once infer that a legend is recent because it
is attached to a new place. Spirits and traditions are like the goblin
of Norse tale, who moved with the family. The family changed its home to
get rid of him, but on the way the elf popped his head out and remarked,
"_Wi flutten_" ("We're flitting" or moving). The ghost of Benjamin
Franklin long haunted the library which he had founded in Philadelphia,
and when the library or books were transferred to a new building, the
ghost went with them and his statue. And in like manner the legend of
the religious person, male or female, who is also a _fish_ has travelled
over many lands, till it came to the _vasca_ or basin of the Porto San
Gallo. Thus Leonard Vair, in his charming _Trois Livres des Charmes_,
_Sorcelages ou Enchantemens_, Paris, 1583, tells us that "there is a
cloister in Burgundy, by which there is a pond, and in this pond are as
many fish as there be monks in the cloister. And when one of the fish
swims on the surface of the water and beats with its tail, then one of
the monks is ever ill." But there is a mass of early Christian or
un-Christian folklore which identifies "Catholic clergy-women" with fish,
even as Quakers are identified in Philadelphia with shad. In Germany all
maids just in their teens are called _Backfisch_, that is, pan-fish or
_fritures_, from their youth and liveliness, or delicacy. We may read in
Friedrich that the fish is a common Christian symbol of immortality,
which fully accounts for all legends of certain of them living for ever.
The story which I have to tell is as follows:--