Chapter LXVI: The Buried Moon

_Source._--Mrs. Balfour's "Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars" in _Folk-Lore_, ii., somewhat abridged and the dialect removed. The story was derived from a little girl named Bratton, who declared she had heard it from her "grannie." Mrs. Balfour thinks the girl's own weird imagination had much to do with framing the details.

_Remarks._--The tale is noteworthy as being distinctly mythical in character, and yet collected within the last ten years from one of the English peasantry. The conception of the moon as a beneficent being, the natural enemy of the bogles and other dwellers of the dark, is natural enough, but scarcely occurs, so far as I recollect, in other mythological systems. There is, at any rate, nothing analogous in the Grimms' treatment of the moon in their _Teutonic Mythology_, tr. Stallybrass, pp. 701-21.