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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Brownies and Bogles, by Louise Imogen Guiney
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Brownies and Bogles
+
+Author: Louise Imogen Guiney
+
+Illustrator: Edmund H. Garrett
+
+Release Date: May 24, 2012 [EBook #39782]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROWNIES AND BOGLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Emmy and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE LITTLE "NECK" IN THE SWEDISH RIVER.]
+
+
+
+
+BROWNIES AND BOGLES
+
+BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
+
+    Author of
+    Songs at the Start
+    Goose-Quill Papers
+    The White Sail
+
+    _Fifty Illustrations by Edmund H Garrett_
+
+    BOSTON
+    D LOTHROP COMPANY
+    FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS
+
+
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1888,
+    BY
+    D. LOTHROP COMPANY.
+
+    PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH, BOSTON.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  CHAPTER I.
+  WHAT FAIRIES WERE AND WHAT THEY DID      11
+
+  CHAPTER II.
+  FAIRY RULERS                             22
+
+  CHAPTER III.
+  THE BLACK ELVES                          33
+
+  CHAPTER IV.
+  THE LIGHT ELVES                          46
+
+  CHAPTER V.
+  DEAR BROWNIE                             63
+
+  CHAPTER VI.
+  OTHER HOUSE-HELPERS                      79
+
+  CHAPTER VII.
+  WATER-FOLK                               96
+
+  CHAPTER VIII.
+  MISCHIEF-MAKERS                         109
+
+  CHAPTER IX.
+  PUCK; AND POETS' FAIRIES                123
+
+  CHAPTER X.
+  CHANGELINGS                             133
+
+  CHAPTER XI.
+  FAIRYLAND                               146
+
+  CHAPTER XII.
+  THE PASSING OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE        159
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+  The little river-neck of Sweden                    _Frontis._
+  "God speed you, gentlemen!"                               16
+  The Neapolitan fairy                                      25
+  The elf-monarch who was made court-fool                   29
+  The Isle of Ruegen Dwarfs that give presents to children   31
+  The Dwarf that borrowed the silk gown                     35
+  The Black Dwarfs of Ruegen planning mischief               38
+  The Troll's children                                      40
+  A Coblynau                                                42
+  "I can't stay any longer!"                                45
+  An elle-maid of Denmark                                   48
+  Bertha, the White Lady                                    49
+  Some Greek fairies                                        51
+  An elf-traveller                                          58
+  Brownie's delight was to do domestic service              65
+  Brownie relishes his bowl of cream                        70
+  All that Pueck demanded                                    73
+  "Wag-at-the-Wa'"                                          75
+  An Irish Cluricaune                                       84
+  Japanese children and Brownies                            86
+  A little Fir-Darrig                                       87
+  The persistent Kobold of Koepenick                         93
+  Mer-folk                                                  98
+  The old Nix near Ghent                                   100
+  The work of the Nickel                                   101
+  Hob in Hobhole                                           106
+  The Irish Pooka was a horse too                          111
+  Will o'-the-Wisp                                         113
+  Pisky also chased the farmers' cows                      118
+  Red Comb was a tyrant                                    119
+  The Welsh Puck                                           126
+  A merry night-wanderer                                   127
+  "By the moon we sport and play"                          129
+  The elves whose little eyes glow                         132
+  There was an Irish changeling                            137
+  "The acorn before the oak have I seen"                   139
+  She heard a faint voice singing under a leaf             143
+  "Ainsel"                                                 144
+  Gitto Bach and the fairies                               148
+  Kaguyahime, the moon-maid                                149
+  The little hunchback                                     152
+  Taknakanx Kan                                            156
+  "Al was this loud fulfilled of faeries"                  161
+  Fairy stories                                            163
+  The capture of Skillywidden                              165
+  Good-bye                                                 171
+
+
+
+
+BROWNIES AND BOGLES.
+
+
+
+
+"BROWNIES AND BOGLES."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+WHAT FAIRIES WERE AND WHAT THEY DID.
+
+
+A FAIRY is a humorous person sadly out of fashion at present, who has
+had, nevertheless, in the actors' phrase, a long and prosperous run on
+this planet. When we speak of fairies nowadays, we think only of small
+sprites who live in a kingdom of their own, with manners, laws, and
+privileges very different from ours. But there was a time when "fairy"
+suggested also the knights and ladies of romance, about whom fine
+spirited tales were told when the world was younger. Spenser's Faery
+Queen, for instance, deals with dream-people, beautiful and brave, as do
+the old stories of Arthur and Roland; people who either never lived, or
+who, having lived, were glorified and magnified by tradition out of all
+kinship with common men. Our fairies are fairies in the modern sense. We
+will make it a rule, from the beginning, that they must be small, and we
+will put out any who are above the regulation height. Such as the
+charming famous Melusina, who wails upon her tower at the death of a
+Lusignan, we may as well skip; for she is a tall young lady, with a
+serpent's tail, to boot, and thus, alas! half-monster; for if we should
+accept any like her in our plan, there is no reason why we should not
+get confused among mermaids and dryads, and perhaps end by scoring down
+great Juno herself as a fairy! Many a dwarf and goblin, whom we shall
+meet anon, is as big as a child. Again, there are rumors in nearly every
+country of finding hundreds of them on a square inch of oak-leaf, or
+beneath the thin shadow of a blade of grass. The fairies of popular
+belief are little and somewhat shrivelled, and quite as apt to be
+malignant as to be frolicsome and gentle. We shall find that they were
+divided into several classes and families; but there is much analogy
+and vagueness among these divisions. By and by you may care to study
+them for yourselves; at present, we shall be very high-handed with the
+science of folk-lore, and pay no attention whatever to learned
+gentlemen, who quarrel so foolishly about these things that it is not
+helpful, nor even funny, to listen to them. A widely-spread notion is
+that when our crusading forefathers went to the Holy Land, they heard
+the Paynim soldiers, whom they fought, speaking much of the Peri, the
+loveliest beings imaginable, who dwelt in the East. Now, the Arabian
+language, which these swarthy warriors used, has no letter P, and
+therefore they called their spirits Feri, as did the Crusaders after
+them; and the word went back with them to Europe, and slipped into
+general use.
+
+"Elf" and "goblin," too, are interesting to trace. There was a great
+Italian feud, in the twelfth century, between the German Emperor and the
+Pope, whose separate partisans were known as the Guelfs and the
+Ghibellines. As time went on, and the memory of that long strife was
+still fresh, a descendant of the Guelfs would put upon anybody he
+disliked the odious name of Ghibelline; and the latter, generation after
+generation, would return the compliment ardently, in his own fashion.
+Both terms, finally, came to be mere catch-words for abuse and reproach.
+And the fairies, falling into disfavor with some bold mortals, were
+angrily nicknamed "elf" and "goblin"; in which shape you will recognize
+the last threadbare reminder of the once bitter and historic faction of
+Guelf and Ghibelline.
+
+It is likely that the tribe were designated as fairies because they
+were, for the most part, fair to see, and full of grace and charm,
+especially among the Celtic branches; and people, at all times, had too
+much desire to keep their good-will, and too much shrinking from their
+rancor and spite, to give them any but the most flattering titles. They
+were seldom addressed otherwise than "the little folk," "the kind folk,"
+"the gentry," "the fair family," "the blessings of their mothers," and
+"the dear wives"; just as, thousands of years back, the noblest and
+cleverest nation the world has ever seen, called the dreaded Three
+"Eumenides," the gracious ones. It is a sure and fast maxim that
+wheedling human nature puts on its best manners when it is afraid. In
+Goldsmith's racy play, She Stoops to Conquer, old Mistress Hardcastle
+meets what she takes to be a robber. She hates robbers, of course, and
+is scared half out of her five wits; but she implores mercy with a
+cowering politeness at which nobody can choose but laugh, of her "good
+Mr. Highwayman." Now, fairies, who knew how to be bountiful and tender,
+and who made slaves of themselves to serve men and women, as we shall
+see, were easily offended, and wrought great mischief and revenge if
+they were not treated handsomely; all of which kept people in the habit
+of courtesy toward them. A whirlwind of dust is a very annoying thing,
+and makes one splutter, and feel absurdly resentful; but in Ireland,
+exactly as in modern Greece, the peasantry thought that it betokened the
+presence of fairies going a journey; so they lifted their hats
+gallantly, and said: "God speed you, gentlemen!"
+
+[Illustration: "GOD SPEED YOU, GENTLEMEN!"]
+
+Fairies had their followers and votaries from early times. Nothing in
+the Bible hints that they were known among the heathens with whom the
+Israelites warred; nothing in classic mythology has any approach to
+them, except the beautiful wood and water-nymphs. Yet poet Homer, Pliny
+the scientist, and Aristotle the philosopher, had some notion of them,
+and of their influence. In old China, whole mountains were peopled with
+them, and the coriander-seeds grown in their gardens gave long life to
+those who ate of them. The Persians had a hierarchy of elves, and were
+the first to set aside Fairyland as their dwelling-place. Saxons, in
+their wild forests, believed in tiny dwarves or demons called Duergar.
+Celtic countries, Scotland, Brittany, Ireland, Wales, were always
+crowded with them. In the "uttermost mountains of India, under a merry
+part of heaven," or by the hoary Nile, according to other writers, were
+the Pigmeos, one cubit high, full-grown at three years, and old at
+seven, who fought with cranes for a livelihood. And the Swiss alchemist,
+Paracelsus (a most pompous and amusing old bigwig), wrote that in his
+day all Germany was filled with fairies two feet long, walking about in
+little coats!
+
+Their favorite color, noticeably in Great Britain, was green; the
+majority of them wore it, and grudged its adoption by a mortal. Sir
+Walter Scott tells us that it was a fatal hue to several families in his
+country, to the entire gallant race of Grahames in particular; for in
+battle a Grahame was almost always shot through the green check of his
+plaid. French fairies went in white; the Nis of Jutland, and many other
+house-sprites, in red and gray, or red and brown; and the plump Welsh
+goblins, whose holiday dress was also white, in the gayest and most
+varied tints of all. In North Wales were "the old elves of the blue
+petticoat"; in Cardiganshire was the familiar green again, though it was
+never seen save in the month of May; and in Pembrokeshire, a uniform of
+jolly scarlet gowns and caps. The fairy gentlemen were quite as much
+given to finery as the ladies, and their general air was one of extreme
+cheerful dandyism. Only the mine and ground-fairies were attired in
+sombre colors. Indeed, their idea of clothes was delightfully liberal;
+an elf bespoke himself by what he chose to wear; and fashions ranged all
+the way from the sprites of the Orkney Islands, who strutted about in
+armor, to the little Heinzelmaenchen of Cologne, who scorned to be
+burdened with so much as a hat!
+
+People accounted in strange ways for their origin. A legend, firmly held
+in Iceland, says that once upon a time Eve was washing a number of her
+children at a spring, and when the Lord appeared suddenly before her,
+she hustled and hid away those who were not already clean and
+presentable; and that they being made forever invisible after, became
+the ancestors of the "little folk," who pervade the hills and caves and
+ruins to this day. In Ireland and Scotland fairies were spoken of as a
+wandering remnant of the fallen angels. The Christian world over, they
+were deemed either for a while, or perpetually, to be locked out from
+the happiness of the blessed in the next world. The Bretons thought
+their Korrigans had been great Gallic princesses, who refused the new
+faith, and clung to their pagan gods, and fell under a curse because of
+their stubbornness. The Small People of Cornwall, too, were imagined to
+be the ancient inhabitants of that country, long before Christ was born,
+not good enough for Heaven, and yet too good to be condemned altogether,
+whose fate it is to stray about, growing smaller and smaller, until by
+and by they vanish from the face of the earth.
+
+Therefore the poor fairy-folk, with whom theology deals so rudely, were
+supposed to be tired waiting, and anxious to know how they might fare
+everlastingly; and they waylaid many mortals, who, of course, really
+could tell them nothing, to ask whether they might not get into Heaven,
+by chance, at the end. It was their chief cause of doubt and melancholy,
+and ran in their little minds from year to year. And since we shall
+revert no more to the sad side of fairy-life, let us close with a most
+sweet story of something which happened in Sweden, centuries ago.
+
+Two boys were gambolling by a river, when a Neck rose up to the air,
+smiling, and twanging his harp. The elder child watched him, and cried
+mockingly: "Neck! what is the good of your sitting there and playing?
+You will never be saved!" And the Neck's sensitive eyes filled with
+tears, and, dropping his harp, he sank forlornly to the bottom. But when
+the brothers had gone home, and told their wise and saintly father, he
+said they had been thoughtlessly unkind; and he bade them hurry back to
+the river, and comfort the little water-spirit. From afar off they saw
+him again on the surface, weeping bitterly. And they called to him:
+"Dear Neck! do not grieve; for our father says that your Redeemer liveth
+also." Then he threw back his bright head, and, taking his harp, sang
+and played with exceeding gladness until sunset was long past, and the
+first star sent down its benediction from the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FAIRY RULERS.
+
+
+THE forming of character among the fairy-folk was a very simple and
+sensible matter. You will imagine that the Pagan, Druid and Christian
+elves varied greatly. And they did; still their morals had nothing to do
+with it, nor pride, nor patriotism, nor descent, nor education; nor
+would all the philosophy you might crowd into a thimble have made one
+bee-big resident of Japan different from a man of his own size in Spain.
+
+They saved themselves no end of trouble by setting up the local
+barometer as their standard. The only Bible they knew was the weather,
+and they followed it stoutly. Whatever the climate was, whatever it had
+helped to make the grown-up nation who lived under it, that, every time,
+were the "brownies and bogles." Where the land was rocky and grim, and
+subject to wild storms and sudden darknesses, the fairies were grim and
+wild too, and full of wicked tricks. Where the landscape was level and
+green, and the crops grew peacefully, they were tame, as in central
+England, and inclined to be sentimental.
+
+And they copied the distinguishing traits of the race among whom they
+dwelt. A frugal Breton fairy spoke the Breton dialect; the Neapolitan
+had a tooth for fruits and macaroni; the Chinese was ceremonious and
+stern; a true Provencal fee was as vain as a peacock, flirting a mirror
+before her, and an Irish elf, bless his little red feathered caubeen!
+was never the man to run away from a fight.
+
+If you look on the map, and see a section of coast-line like that of
+Cornwall or Norway, a sunshiny, perilous, foamy place, make up your mind
+that the fairies thereabouts were fellows worth knowing; that you would
+have needed all your wit and pluck to get the better of them, and that
+they would have made live, hearty playmates, too, while in good humor,
+for any brave boy or girl.
+
+We do not know nearly so much about the genuine fairies as we should
+like. They must have been, at one time or another, in every European
+country. Most of the Oriental spirits were taller, and of another brood;
+they figured either as demons, or as what we should now call angels. But
+in the Germanic colonies, from very old days, fairy-lore was finely
+developed, and we count up tribe on tribe of necks, nixies, stromkarls
+and mermaids, who were water-sprites; of bergmaennchen (little men of the
+mountain), and lovely wild-women in hilly places; of trolls around the
+woods and rocks; of elves in the air, and gnomes or duergars in caverns
+or mines. Yet from Portugal, and Russia, and Hungary, and from our own
+North American Indians, we learn so little that it is not worth
+counting.
+
+If the good dear peasants who were acquainted with the fairies had made
+more rhymes about them, and handed them down more attentively; if it had
+occurred to the knowing scholar-monks to keep diaries of elfin doings,
+as it would have done had they but known how soon their little friends
+were to be extinct, like the glyptodon and the dodo, how wise should we
+not be!
+
+[Illustration: THE NEAPOLITAN FAIRY.]
+
+But again, though there were hosts of supernatural beings in the beliefs
+of every old land, we have no business with any but the wee ones. And as
+these were settled most thickly in the Teutonic, Celtic and Cymric
+countries, we will turn our curiosity thither, without farther
+grumbling, and be glad to get so much authentic news of them as we may.
+
+Fairies, as a whole, seem at bottom rather weak and disconsolate. For
+all of their magic and cunning, for all of their high station, and its
+feasting and glory, they could not keep from seeking human sympathy.
+They did, indeed, hurt men, resent intrusions, foretell the future, and
+call down disease and storm, but they stood in awe of the weakest mortal
+because of his superior strength and size; they came to him to borrow
+food and medicine, and even to ask the loan of his house for their
+revels. They rendered themselves invisible, but he had always at his
+feet the fern-seed, the talisman of four-leaved clover (or, as in
+Scotland, the leaf of the ash or rowan-tree), with which he could defeat
+their design, and protect himself against the attacks of any witch, imp,
+or fairy whatsoever.
+
+Their government was a happy-go-lucky affair. The various tribes of
+fairies had no common interests which would make them sigh for
+post-offices, or cables, or general synods. Each set of them got along,
+independent of the rest. Once in a while a mine-man would live alone
+with his wife, pegging away at his daily work, without any idea of
+hurrahing for his King or, more likely, his Queen; or even of hunting up
+his own cousins in the next county.
+
+If we had elves in the United States nowadays, they would no doubt be
+American enough to elect a President and have him as honest, and steady,
+and sound-hearted as needs be. But dwelling as they did in feudal days,
+they set up thrones and sceptres all over Fairydom.
+
+According to the poets, Mab and Oberon are the crowned rulers of the
+little people. In reality, they had no supreme head. Among many parties
+and factions, each small agreeing community had its own chief, the
+tallest of his race, who was no chief at all, mind you, to the fairy
+neighbors a mile east. The delicate yellow Chinese fairy-mother was Si
+Wang Mu; and in the Netherlands, the elf-queen, who was also queen of
+the witches, was called Wanne Thekla.
+
+We snatch an item here and there of the royal histories. We find that
+the sweet-natured Elberich in the Niebelungen is the same as Oberon. In
+Germany was a dwarf-king named Goldemar, who lived with a knight, shared
+his bed, played at dice with him, gave him good advice, called him
+Brother-in-law very fondly, and comforted him with the music of his
+harp. But Goldemar, though the knight loved him and could touch and feel
+him, was unseen. He was like a wreath of blue smoke, or a fragment of
+moonlight, and you could run a sword through him, and never change his
+kind smile. His royal hands were lean, and soft, and cold as a frog's.
+After three years, perhaps when Brother-in-law was dead, or when he was
+married, and needed him no longer, the gentle dwarf-king disappeared.
+
+Sinnels, Guebich, and Heiling were other dwarf-princes, probably rivals
+of Goldemar, and ready to have at him till their breath gave out. Their
+little majesties were quarrelsome as cock-sparrows. The elf-monarch
+Laurin was once conquered by Theodoric; and because he had been
+treacherous in war (which was not "fair" at all, despite the proverb),
+he got a very sad rebuff to his dignity, in being made fool or buffoon
+at the court of Bern.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELF-MONARCH WHO WAS MADE COURT-FOOL.]
+
+We are told in the Mabinogion how the daughter of Llud Llaw Ereint was
+"the most splendid maiden in the three islands of the mighty," and how
+for her Gwyn ap Nudd, the Welsh fairy-king, battles every May-day from
+dawn until sunset. Gwyn once carried her off from Gwythyr, her true
+lord; and both lovers were so furious and cruel against each other that
+blessed King Arthur condemned them to wage bitter fight on each
+first-of-May till the world's end; and to whomsoever is victorious the
+greatest number of times, the fair lady shall then be given. Let us
+hope the reward will not fall to thieving Gwyn.
+
+We have said that we should do pretty much as we pleased in ranging the
+myriad fairy-folk into ranks and species. If, as we prowl about, we see
+a baby in the house of the Elfsmiths, who has a look of the Elfbrowns,
+we will immediately kidnap him from his fond parents, and add him to the
+family he resembles. Now that might make wailing and confusion, and
+bring down vengeance on our heads, if there were any Queen Mab left to
+rap us to order; but as things go, we shall find it a very neat way of
+smoothing difficulties.
+
+[Illustration: THE ISLE OF RUeGEN DWARVES THAT GIVE PRESENTS TO
+CHILDREN.]
+
+Of course there are certain pigwidgeons too accomplished, too slippery,
+too many things in one, to be ticketed and tied down like the rest; such
+versatile fellows as the Brown Dwarves of the Isle of Ruegen, for
+instance. They lived in what were called the Vine-hills, and were not
+quite eighteen inches high. They wore little snuff-brown jackets and a
+brown cap (which made them invisible, and allowed them to pass through
+the smallest keyhole), with one wee silver bell at its peak, not to be
+lost for any money. But they did some roguish things; and children who
+fell into their hands had to serve them for fifty years! With caprice
+usual to their kin, they will, on other occasions, befriend and protect
+children, and give them presents; or plague untidy servants, like
+Brownie, or lead travellers astray by night into bogs and marshes, like
+the Ellydan and the Fir-Darrig, and mischievous double-faced Robin
+Goodfellow himself.
+
+An ancient tradition says that while the grass-blades are sprouting at
+the root, the earth-elves water and nourish them; and the moment the
+growth pierces the soil, affectionate air-elves take it in charge.
+Therefore we borrow a hint from the grass; and after first going down
+among the swarthy fairies who burrow underground, we shall pass up to
+companionship with little beings so beautiful that wherever they flock
+there is starlight and song.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE BLACK ELVES.
+
+
+ACCORDING to the very old Scandinavian notion, land-fairies were of two
+sorts; the Light or Good Elves who dwelt in air, or out-of-doors on the
+earth, and the Black or Evil Elves who dwelt beneath it.
+
+We will follow the Norse folk. If we were required to group human beings
+under two headings, we should choose that same Good and Evil, because
+the division occurs to one naturally, because it saves time, and because
+everybody comprehends it, and sees that it is based upon law; and so do
+we deal with our wonder-friends, who have the strange moral sorcery
+belonging to each of us their masters, to help or to harm.
+
+The evil fairies, then, were the scowling underground tribes, who hid
+themselves from the frank daylight, and the open reaches of the fields.
+Yet just as the good fairies had many a sad failing to offset their
+grace and charm, the grim, dark-skinned manikins had sudden impulses
+towards honor and kindness. In fact, as we noted before, they were
+astonishingly like our fellow-creatures, of whom scarce any is entirely
+faultless, or entirely warped and ruined.
+
+For instance, the Hill-men, in Switzerland, were very generous-minded;
+they drove home stray lambs at night, and put berry-bushes in the way of
+poor children. And the more modern Dwarves of Germany, frequenting the
+clefts of rocks, were silent, mild, and well-disposed, and apt to bring
+presents to those who took their fancy. Like others of the elf-kingdom,
+they loved to borrow from mortals. Once a little bowing Dwarf came to a
+lady for the loan of her silk gown for a fairy-bride. (You can imagine
+that, at the ceremony, the groom must have had a pretty hunt among the
+wilderness of finery to get at her ring-finger!) Of course the lady gave
+it; but worrying over its tardy return, she went to the Dwarves' hill
+and asked for it aloud. A messenger with a sorrowful countenance
+brought it to her at once, spotted over and over with wax. But he told
+her that had she been less impatient every stain would have been a
+diamond!
+
+[Illustration: THE DWARF THAT BORROWED THE SILK GOWN.]
+
+The huge, terrible, ogre-like Hindoo Rakshas, the weird Divs and Jinns
+of Persia, and the ancient demon-dwarves of the south called Panis, may
+be considered the foster-parents of our dwindled minims, as the glorious
+Peris on the other hand gave their name, and some of their qualities, to
+a little European family of very different ancestry.
+
+The Black Elves will serve as our general name for dwarves and
+mine-fairies. These are closely connected in all legends, live in the
+same neighborhoods, and therefore claim a mention together. They have
+four points in common: dark skin; short, bulky bodies; fickle and
+irritable natures; and occupations as miners, misers, or metalsmiths.
+And because of their exceeding industry, on the old maxim's authority,
+where all work and no play made Jack a dull boy, they are curiously
+heavy-headed and preposterous jacks; and, waiving their plain faces, not
+in any wise engaging. Yet perhaps, being largely German, they may be
+philosophers, and so vastly superior to any little gabbling,
+somersaulting ragamuffin over in Ireland.
+
+In the Middle Ages, they were described as withered and leering, with
+small, sharp, snapping black eyes, bright as gems; with cracked voices,
+and matted hair, and horns peering from it! and as if that were not
+enough adornment, they had claws, which must have been filched from the
+ghosts of mediaeval pussy-cats, on their fingers and toes.
+
+The first Duergars belonging to the Gotho-German mythology, were
+muscular and strong-legged; and when they stood erect, their arms
+reached to the ground. They were clever and expert handlers of metal,
+and made of gold, silver and iron, the finest armor in the world. They
+wrought for Odin his great spear, and for Thor his hammer, and for Frey
+the wondrous ship _Skidbladnir_.
+
+Long ago, too, armor-making Elves, black as pitch, lived in
+Svart-Alfheim, in the bowels of the earth, and were able, by their
+glance or touch or breath, to cause sickness and death wheresoever they
+wished.
+
+[Illustration: THE BLACK DWARVES OF RUeGEN PLANNING MISCHIEF.]
+
+Still uglier were the Black Dwarves of the mysterious Isle of Ruegen; nor
+had they any frolicsome or cordial ways which should bring up our
+opinion of them. Their pale eyes ran water, and every midnight they
+mewed and screeched horribly from their holes. In idle summer-hours they
+sat under the elder-trees, planning by twos and threes to wreak mischief
+on mankind. They, as well, were once useful, if not beautiful; for in
+the days when heroes wore a panoply of steel, the Black Dwarves wrought
+fair helmets and corselets of cobwebby mail which no lance could pierce,
+and swords flexible as silk which could unhorse the mightiest foe. The
+little blackamoors frequented mining districts, and dug for ore on
+their own account. They were said to be very rich, owning unnumbered
+chests stored underground. The most exciting tales about gnomes of all
+nations were founded on the efforts of daring mortals to get possession
+of their wealth.
+
+To the mining division belong the dwarf-Trolls of Denmark and Sweden
+(for there were giant-Trolls as well), and the whimsical Spriggans of
+Cornwall. The Trolls burrowed in mounds and hills, and were called also
+Bjerg-folk or Hill-folk; they lived in societies or families, baking and
+brewing, marrying and visiting, in the old humdrum way. They made
+fortunes, and hoarded up heaps of money. But they were often obliging
+and benevolent; it gave them pleasure to bestow gifts, to lend and
+borrow, and sometimes, alas! to steal. They played prettily on musical
+instruments, and were very jolly. People used to see the stumpy little
+children of the genteel Troll who lived at Kund in Jutland, climbing up
+the knoll which was the roof of their own house, and rolling down one
+after the other with shouts of laughter. The Trolls were famous
+gymnasts, and very plump and round. Our word "droll" is left to us in
+merry remembrance of them.
+
+[Illustration: THE TROLL'S CHILDREN.]
+
+They were tractable creatures, as you may know from the tale of the
+farmer, who, ploughing an angry Troll's land, agreed, for the sake of
+peace, to go halves in the crops sown upon it, so that one year the
+Troll should have what grew above ground, and the next year what grew
+under. But the sly farmer planted radishes and carrots, and the Troll
+took the tops; and the following season he planted corn; and his queer
+partner gathered up the roots and marched off in triumph. Indeed, it was
+so easy to outwit the simple Troll that a generous farmer would never
+have played the game out, and we should have lost our little story. It
+was mean to take advantage of the sweet fellow's trustfulness. There was
+an English schoolmaster once, a man wise, firm, and kind, and of vast
+influence, of whom one of his boys said to another: "It's a shame to
+tell a lie to Arnold; he always believes it." That was a ray of real
+chivalry.
+
+The Spriggans were fond of dwelling near walls and loose stones, with
+which it was unlucky to tamper, and where they slipped in and out with
+suspicious eyes, guarding their buried treasure. If a house was robbed,
+or the cattle were carried away, or a hurricane swooped down on a
+Cornish village, the neighbors attributed their trouble to the
+Spriggans; whereby you may believe they had fine reputations for
+meddlesomeness. Their cousins, the Buccas, Bockles or Knockers, were
+gentlemen who went about thumping and rapping wherever there was a vein
+of ore for the weary workmen, cheating, occasionally, to break the
+monotony.
+
+[Illustration: A COBLYNAU.]
+
+The Welsh Coblynau followed the same profession, and pointed out the
+desired places in mines and quarries. The Coblynau were copper-colored,
+and very homely, as were all the pigmies who lived away from the sun;
+they were busybodies, half-a-yard high, who imitated the dress of their
+friends the miners, and pegged away at the rocks, like them, with great
+noise and gusto, accomplishing nothing. Their houses were far-removed
+from mortal vision, and unlike certain proper children, now obsolete,
+the Coblynau themselves were generally heard, but not seen.
+
+Their German relation was the Wichtlein (little wight) an extremely
+small fellow, whom the Bohemians named Hans-schmiedlein (little John
+Smith!) because he makes a noise like the stroke of an anvil.
+
+Dwarves and mine-men went about, unfailingly, with a purseful of gold.
+But if anyone snatched it from them, only stones and twine and a pair of
+scissors were to be found in it. The Leprechaun, or Cluricaune, whom we
+shall meet later as the fairy-cobbler, was an Irish celebrity who knew
+where pots of guineas were hidden, and who carried in his pocket a
+shilling often-spent and ever-renewed. He looked, in this banker-like
+capacity, a clumsy small boy, dressed in various ways, sometimes in a
+long coat and cocked hat, unlike the Danish Troll, who kept to homely
+gray, with the universal little red cap. Even the respectable Kobold,
+who was, virtually, a house-spirit, caught the fever of fortune-hunting,
+and often threw up his domestic duties to seek the fascinating nuggets
+in the mines.
+
+There is a funny anecdote of a Troll who, as was common with his race,
+cunningly concealed his prize under the shape of a coal. Now a peasant
+on his way to church one bright Sunday morning saw him trying vainly to
+move a couple of crossed straws which had blown upon his coal; for
+anything in the shape of a cross seemed to shrivel up an elf's power in
+the most startling manner. So the little sprite turned, half-crying, and
+begged the peasant to move the straws for him. But the man was too
+shrewd for that, and took up the coal, straws and all, and ran, despite
+the poor Troll's screaming, and saw, on reaching home, that he had
+captured a lump of solid gold.
+
+All Black Elves were particular about their neighborhoods, and a whole
+colony would migrate at once if they took the least offence, or if the
+villagers about got "too knowing" for them. (An American poet once wrote
+a sonnet "To Science," in which he berated her for having made him "too
+knowing," and for having driven
+
+        --"the Naiad from her flood
+    The elfin from the green grass";
+
+and it was in consequence of his very knowingness, no doubt, that,
+beauty-loving and marvel-loving as were his sensitive eyes, they never
+saw so much as the vanishing shadow of a fairy.) A little dwarf-woman
+told two young Bavarians that she intended to leave her favorite
+dwelling, because of the shocking cursing and swearing of the
+country-people! But they were not all so godly.
+
+[Illustration: "I CAN'T STAY ANY LONGER!"]
+
+Ever since the great god Thor threw his hammer at the Trolls, they have
+hated noise as much as Mr. Thomas Carlyle, who, however, made Thor's own
+bluster in the world himself. They sought sequestered places that they
+might not be disturbed. The Prussian mites near Dardesheim were
+frightened away by the forge and the factory. Above all else,
+church-bells distressed them, and spoiled their tempers. A huckster once
+passed a Danish Troll, sitting disconsolately on a stone, and asked him
+what the matter might be. "I hate to leave this country," blubbered the
+fat mourner, "but I can't stay where there is such an eternal ringing
+and dinging!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE LIGHT ELVES.
+
+
+Over the beautiful Light Elves of the _Edda_, in old Scandinavia, ruled
+the beloved sun-god Frey; and they lived in a summer land called
+Alfheim, and it was their office to sport in air or on the leaves of
+trees, and to make the earth thrive.
+
+But they changed character as centuries passed; and they came to
+resemble the fairies of Great Britain in their extreme waywardness and
+fickleness. For though they were fair and benevolent most of the time,
+they could be, when it so pleased them, ugly and hurtful; and what they
+could be, they very often were; for fairies were not expected to keep a
+firm rein on their moods and tempers.
+
+Norwegian peasants described some of their Huldrafolk as tiny bare boys,
+with tall hats; and in Sweden, as well, they were slender and delicate.
+When a Swedish elf-maid or moon-maid wished to approach the inmates of a
+house, she rode on a sunbeam through the keyhole, or between the
+openings in a shutter.
+
+The German wild-women were like them, going about alone, and having fine
+hair flowing to their feet. They had some odd traits, one of which was
+sermonizing! and exhorting stray mortals who had done them a service, to
+lead a godly life.
+
+The elle-maid in Denmark and in neighboring countries was always winsome
+and graceful, and carried an enchanted harp. She loved moonlight best,
+and was a charming dancer. But her evil element was in her very beauty,
+with which she entrapped foolish young gentlemen, and waylaid them, and
+carried them off who knows whither? She could be detected by the shape
+of her back, it being hollow, like a spoon; which was meant to show that
+there was something wrong with her, and that she was not what she
+seemed, but fit only for the abhorrence of passers-by. The elle-man, her
+mate, was old and ill-favored, a disagreeable person; for if any one
+came near him while he was bathing in the sun, he opened his mouth and
+breathed pestilence upon them.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELLE-MAID, OF DENMARK.]
+
+[Illustration: BERTHA, THE WHITE LADY.]
+
+A common trait of the air-fairies was to assist at a birth and give the
+infant, at their will, good and bad gifts. Dame Bertha, the White Lady
+of Germany, came to the birth of certain princely babes, and the
+Korrigans made it a general practice. Whenever they nursed or tended a
+new-born mortal, bestowed presents on him and foretold his destiny, one
+of the little people was almost always perverse enough to bestow and
+foretell something unfortunate. You all know Grimm's beautiful tale of
+Dornroeschen, which in English we call The Sleeping Beauty, where the
+jealous thirteenth fairy predicts the poor young lady's spindle-wound.
+Around the famous Roche des Fees in the forest of Theil, are those who
+believe yet that the elves pass in and out at the chimneys, on errands
+to little children.
+
+The modern Greek fairies haunted trees, danced rounds, bathed in cool
+water, and carried off whomsoever they coveted. A person offending them
+in their own fields was smitten with disease.
+
+The Chinese Shan Sao were a foot high, lived among the mountains, and
+were afraid of nothing. They, too, were revengeful; for if they were
+attacked or annoyed by mortals, they "caused them to sicken with
+alternate heat and cold." Bonfires were burnt to drive them away.
+
+The innocent White Dwarves of the Isle of Ruegen in the Baltic Sea, made
+lace-work of silver, too fine for the eye to detect, all winter long;
+but came idly out into the woods and fields with returning spring,
+leaping and singing, and wild with affectionate joy. They were not
+allowed to ramble about in their own shapes; therefore they changed
+themselves to doves and butterflies, and winged their way to good
+mortals, whom they guarded from all harm.
+
+[Illustration: SOME GREEK FAIRIES.]
+
+The Korrigans of Brittainy, mentioned a while ago, were peculiar in many
+ways. They had beautiful singing voices and bright eyes, but they never
+danced. They preferred to sit still at twilight, like mermaids, combing
+their long golden hair. The tallest of them was nearly two feet high,
+fair as a lily, and transparent as dew itself, yet able as the rest to
+seem dark, and humpy, and terrifying. He who passed the night with them,
+or joined in their sports, was sure to die shortly, since their very
+breath or touch was fatal. And again, as in the case of Seigneur Nann,
+about whom a touching Breton ballad was made, they doomed to death any
+who refused to marry one of them within three days.
+
+Of the American Indian fairies we do not know much. In Mr. Schoolcraft's
+books of Indian legends there is a beautiful little Bone-dwarf, who may
+almost be considered a fairy. In the land of the Sioux they tell the
+pretty story of Antelope and Karkapaha, and how the wee warrior-folk,
+thronging on the hill, clad in deerskin, and armed with feathered arrow
+and spear, put the daring heart of a slain enemy into the breast of the
+timid lover, Karkapaha, and made him worthy both to win and keep his
+lovely maiden, and to deserve homage for his bravery, from her tribe
+and his. Some of you will remember one thing against the Puk-Wudjies,
+which is an Algonquin name meaning "little vanishing folk," to wit: that
+they killed Hiawatha's friend, "the very strong man Kwasind," as our
+Longfellow called him. He had excited their envy, and they flung on his
+head, as he floated in his canoe, the only thing on earth that could
+kill him, the seed-vessel of the white pine.
+
+The Scotch, Irish and English overground fairies were, as a general
+thing, very much alike. They had the power of becoming visible or
+invisible, compressing or enlarging their size, and taking any shape
+they pleased. When an Irish Shefro was disturbed or angry, and wanted to
+get a house or a person off her grounds, she put on the strangest
+appearances: she could crow, spit fire, slap a tail or a hoof about,
+grin like a dragon, or give a frightful, weird, lion-like roar. Of
+course the object of her polite attentions thought it best to oblige
+her. If she and her companions were anxious to enter a house, they
+lifted the spryest of their number to the keyhole, and pushed him
+through. He carried a piece of string, which he fastened to the inside
+knob, and the other end to a chair or stool; and over this perilous
+bridge the whole giggling tribe marched in one by one. The Irish and
+Scotch fays were more mischievous than the English, but have not fared
+so well, having had no memorable verses made about them. The little
+Scots were sometimes dwarfish wild creatures, wrapped in their plaids,
+or, oftener, comely and yellow-haired; the ladies in green mantles,
+inlaid with wild-flowers; and dapper little gentlemen in green trousers,
+fastened with bobs of silk. They carried arrows, and went on tiny
+spirited horses, as did the Welsh fairies, "the silver bosses of their
+bridles jingling in the night-breeze." An old account of Scotland says
+that they were "clothed in green, with dishevelled hair floating over
+their shoulders, and faces more blooming than the vermeil blush of a
+summer morning."
+
+Their Welsh cousins were many. A native poet once sang of them:
+
+          ----In every hollow,
+    A hundred wry-mouthed elves.
+
+They were queer little beings, and had notions of what was decorous, for
+they combed the goats' beards every Friday night, "to make them decent
+for Sunday!" They were very quarrelsome; you could hear them snarling
+and jabbering like jays among themselves, so that in some parts of Wales
+a proverb has arisen: "They can no more agree than the fairies!" The
+inhabitants believed that the midgets never had courage to go through
+the gorse, or prickly furze, which is a common shrub in that country.
+One sick old woman who was bothered by the Tylwyth Teg ("the fair
+family") souring her milk and spilling her tea, used to choke up her
+room with the furze, and make such a hedge about the bed, that nothing
+larger than a needle could be so much as pointed at her. In Breconshire
+the Tylwyth Teg gave loaves to the peasantry, which, if they were not
+eaten then and there in the dark, would turn in the morning into
+toadstools! When Welsh fairies took it into their heads to bestow food
+and money, very lazy people were often supported in great style, without
+a stroke of work. And the Tylwyth Teg loved to reward patience and
+generosity. They played the harp continuously, and, on grand occasions,
+the bugle; but if a bagpipe was heard among them, that indicated a
+Scotch visitor from over the border.
+
+King James I. of England mentions in his _Daemonology_ a "King and Queene
+of Phairie: sic a jolie courte and traine as they had!" Nothing could
+have exceeded the state and elegance of their ceremonious little lives.
+According to a sweet old play, they had houses made all of
+mother-of-pearl, an ivory tennis-court, a nutmeg parlor, a sapphire
+dairy-room, a ginger hall; chambers of agate, kitchens of crystal, the
+jacks of gold, the spits of Spanish needles! They dressed in imported
+cobweb! with a four-leaved clover, lined with a dog-tooth violet, for
+overcoat; and they ate (think of eating such a pretty thing!) delicious
+rainbow-tart, the trout-fly's gilded wing, and
+
+      ----the broke heart of a nightingale
+    O'ercome with music.
+
+But we never heard that Chinese or Scandinavian elves could afford such
+luxury.
+
+Their English dwellings were often in the bubble-castles of sunny
+brooks; and the bright-jacketed hobgoblins took their pleasure sitting
+under toadstools, or paddling about in egg-shell boats, playing
+jew's-harps large as themselves. Beside the freehold of blossomy
+hillocks and dingles, they had dells of their own, and palaces, with
+everything lovely in them; and whatever they longed for was to be had
+for the wishing. They had fair gardens in clefts of the Cornish rocks,
+where vari-colored flowers, only seen by moonlight, grew; in these
+gardens they loved to walk, tossing a posy to some mortal passing by;
+but if he ever gave it away they were angry with him forever after. They
+liked to fish; and the crews put out to sea in funny uniforms of green,
+with red caps. They travelled on a fern, a rush, a bit of weed, or even
+boldly bestrode the bee and the dragon-fly; and they went to the chase,
+as in the Isle of Man, on full-sized horses whenever they could get
+them! and when it came to time of war, their armies laid-to like
+Alexander's own, with mushroom-shield and bearded grass-blades for
+mighty spears, and honeysuckle trumpets braying furiously! There are
+traditions of battles so vehement and long that the cavalry trampled
+down the dews of the mountain-side, and sent many a peerless fellow, at
+every charge, to the fairy hospitals and cemeteries.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELF-TRAVELLER.]
+
+Their chief and all but universal amusement, sacred to moonlight and
+music, was dancing hand-in-hand; and what was called a fairy-ring was
+the swirl of grasses in a field taller and deeper green than the rest,
+which was supposed to mark their circling path. Inside these rings it
+was considered very dangerous to sleep, especially after sundown. If
+you put your foot within them, with a companion's foot upon your own,
+the elfin tribe became visible to you, and you heard their tinkling
+laughter; and if, again, you wished a charm to defy all their anger,
+for they hated to be overlooked by mortal eyes, you had merely to turn
+your coat inside out. But a house built where the wee folks had danced
+was made prosperous.
+
+Hear how deftly old John Lyly, nearly four hundred years ago, put the
+dancing in his lines:
+
+    Round about, round about, in a fine ring-a,
+    Thus we dance, thus we prance, and thus we sing-a!
+    Trip and go, to and fro, over this green-a;
+    All about, in and out, for our brave queen-a.
+
+For the elves, as we know, were governed generally by a queen, who bore
+a white wand, and stood in the centre while her gay retainers skipped
+about her. Fairy-rings were common in every Irish parish. At Alnwick in
+Northumberland County in England, was one celebrated from antiquity; and
+it was believed that evil would befall any who ran around it more than
+nine times. The children were constantly running it that often; but
+nothing could tempt the bravest of them all to go one step farther. In
+France, as in Wales, the fairies guarded the cromlechs with care, and
+preferred to hold revel near them.
+
+At these merry festivals, in the pauses of action, meat and drink were
+passed around. A Danish ballad tells how Svend-Faelling drained a horn
+presented by elf-maids, which made him as strong as twelve men, and gave
+him the appetite of twelve men, too; a natural but embarrassing
+consequence. It used to be proclaimed that any one daring enough to rush
+on a fairy feast, and snatch the drinking-glass, and get away with it,
+would be lucky henceforward. The famous goblet, the Luck of Edenhall,
+was seized after that fashion, by one of the Musgraves; whereat the
+little people disappeared, crying aloud:
+
+    If that glass do break or fall,
+    Farewell the Luck of Edenhall!
+
+Once upon a time the Duke of Wharton dined at Edenhall, and came very
+near ruining his host, and all his race; for the precious Luck slipped
+from his hand; but the clever butler at his elbow happily caught it in
+his napkin, and averted the catastrophe: so the beautiful cup and the
+favored family enjoy each other in security to this day.
+
+In the Song of Sir Olaf, we are told how he fell in, while riding by
+night, with the whirling elves; and how, after their every plea and
+threat that he should stay from his to-be-wedded sweetheart at home, and
+dance, instead, with them, he hears the weird French refrain:
+
+    O the dance, the dance! How well the dance goes under the trees!
+
+And through their wicked magic, after all his steadfast resistance, with
+the wild music and the dizzy measure whirling in his brain, there he
+dies.
+
+All the gay, unsteady, fantastic motion broke up at the morning
+cock-crow, and instantly the little bacchantes vanished. And, strangest
+of all! the betraying flash of the dawn showed their peach-like color,
+their blonde, smooth hair, and bodily agility changed, like a Dead Sea
+apple, and turned into ugliness and distortion! It was not the lovely
+vision of a minute back which hurried away on the early breeze, but a
+crowd of leering, sullen-eyed bugaboos, laughing fiercely to think how
+they had deceived a beholder.
+
+These, then, were the Light Elves, not all lovable, or loyal, or gentle,
+as they were expected to be, but cruel to wayfarers like poor Sir Olaf,
+and treacherous and mocking; beautiful so long as they were good, and
+hideous when they had done a foul deed. It is hard to say wherein they
+were better than the Underground Elves, who were, despite some kindly
+characteristics, professional doers of evil, and had not the choice or
+chance of being so happy and fortunate. But we record them as we find
+them, not without the sobering thought that here, as at every point, the
+fairies are a running commentary on the puzzle of our own human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+DEAR BROWNIE.
+
+
+BROWNIE, the willing drudge, the kind little housemate, was the most
+popular of all fairies; and it is he whom we now love and know best.
+
+He was a sweet, unselfish fellow; but very wide awake as well, full of
+mischief, and spirited as a young eagle, when he was deprived of his
+rights. He belonged to a tribe of great influence and size, and each
+division of that tribe, inhabiting different countries, bore a different
+name. But the word Brownie, to English-speaking people, will serve as
+meaning those fairies who attached themselves persistently to any spot
+or any family, and who labored in behalf of their chosen home.
+
+The Brownie proper belonged to the Shetland and the Western Isles, to
+Cornwall, and the Highlands and Borderlands of Scotland. He was an
+indoor gentleman, and varied in that from our friends the Black and
+Light Elves. He took up his dwelling in the house or the barn, sometimes
+in a special corner, or under the roof, or even in the cellar pantries,
+where he ate a great deal more than was good for him. In the beginning
+he was supposed to have been covered with short curly brown hair, like a
+clipped water-spaniel, whence his name. But he changed greatly in
+appearance. Later accounts picture him with a homely, sunburnt little
+face, as if bronzed with long wind and weather; dark-coated, red-capped,
+and shod with noiseless slippers, which were as good as wings to his
+restless feet. Along with him, in Scotch houses, and in English houses
+supplanting him, often lived the Dobie or Dobbie who was not by any
+means so bright and active ("O, ye stupid Dobie!" runs a common phrase),
+and therefore not to be confounded with him.
+
+[Illustration: BROWNIE'S DELIGHT WAS TO DO DOMESTIC SERVICE.]
+
+Brownie's delight was to do domestic service; he churned, baked, brewed,
+mowed, threshed, swept, scrubbed, and dusted; he set things in order,
+saved many a step to his mistress, and took it upon himself to manage
+the maid-servants, and reform them, if necessary, by severe and original
+measures. Neatness and precision he dearly loved, and never forgot to
+drop a penny over-night in the shoe of the person deserving well of him.
+But lax offenders he pinched black and blue, and led them an exciting
+life of it. His favorite revenge, among a hundred equally ingenious, was
+dragging the disorderly servant out of bed. A great poet announced in
+Brownie's name:
+
+    'Twixt sleep and wake
+    I do them take,
+    And on the key-cold floor them throw!
+    If out they cry
+    Then forth I fly,
+    And loudly laugh I: "Ho, ho, ho!"
+
+Like all gnomes truly virtuous, he could be the worst varlet, the most
+meddlesome, troublesome, burdensome urchin to be imagined, when the whim
+was upon him. At such times he gloried in undoing all his good deeds;
+and by way of emphasizing his former tidiness and industry, he tore
+curtains, smashed dishes, overturned tables, and made havoc among the
+kitchen-pans. All this was done in a sort of holy wrath; for be it to
+Brownie's credit, that if he were treated with courtesy, and if the
+servants did their own duties honestly, he was never other than his
+gentle, well-behaved, hard-working little self.
+
+He asked no wages; he had a New England scorn of "tipping," when he had
+been especially obliging; and he could not be wheedled into accepting
+even so much as a word of praise. A farmer at Washington, in Sussex,
+England, who had often been surprised in the morning at the large heaps
+of corn threshed for him during the night, determined at last to sit up
+and watch what went on. Creeping to the barn-door, and peering through a
+chink, he saw two manikins working away with their fairy flails, and
+stopping an instant now and then, only to say to each other: "See how I
+sweat! See how I sweat!" the very thing which befell Milton's "lubbar
+fiend" in L'Allegro. The farmer, in his pleasure, cried: "Well done, my
+little men!" whereupon the startled sprites uttered a cry, and whirled
+and whisked out of sight, never to toil again in his barn.
+
+It is said that not long ago, there was a whole tribe of tiny, naked
+Kobolds (Brownie's German name) called Heinzelmaenchen, who bound
+themselves for love to a tailor of Cologne, and did, moreover, all the
+washing and scouring and kettle-cleaning for his wife. Whatever work
+there was left for them to do was straightway done; but no man ever
+beheld them. The tailor's prying spouse played many a ruse to get sight
+of them, to no avail. And they, knowing her curiosity and grieved at it,
+suddenly marched, with music playing, out of the town forever. People
+heard their flutes and viols only, for none saw the little exiles
+themselves, who got into a boat, and sailed "westward, westward!" like
+Hiawatha, and the city's luck is thought to have gone with them.
+
+But Brownie, who would take neither money, nor thanks, nor a glance of
+mortal eyes, and who departed in high dudgeon as soon as a reward was
+offered him, could be bribed very prettily, if it were done in a polite
+and secretive way. He was not too scrupulous to pocket whatever might be
+dropped on a stair, or a window-sill, where he was sure to pass several
+times in a day, and walk off, whistling, to keep his own counsel, and
+say nothing about it. And for goodies, mysterious goodies left in queer
+places by chance, he had excellent tooth. Housewives, from the era of
+the first Brownie, never failed slyly to gladden his favorite haunt with
+the dish which he liked best, and which, so long as it was fresh and
+plentiful, he considered a satisfactory squaring-up of accounts. One of
+these desired treats was knuckled cakes, made of meal warm from the
+mill, toasted over the embers, and spread with honey. To other tidbits,
+also, he was partial; but, first and last, he relished his bowl of cream
+left on the floor overnight. Cream he drank and expected the world over;
+and in Devon, and in the Isle of Man, he liked a basin of water for a
+bath.
+
+[Illustration: BROWNIE RELISHES HIS BOWL OF CREAM.]
+
+Fine clothes were quite to his mind; he was very vain when he had them;
+and it was what Pet Marjorie called "majestick pride," and no whim of
+anger or sensitiveness, which sent him hurrying off the moment his
+wardrobe was supplied by some grateful housekeeper, to eschew work
+forever after, and set himself up as a gentleman of leisure. Many funny
+stories are told of his behavior under an unexpected shower of dry
+goods. Brownie, who in his humble station, was so steadfast and
+sensible, had his poor head completely turned by the vision of a new
+bright-colored jacket. The gentle little Piskies or Pixies of
+Devonshire, who are of the Brownie race, and very different from the
+malicious Piskies in Cornwall, were likewise great dandies, and sure to
+decamp as soon as ever they obtained a fresh cap or petticoat. Indeed,
+they dropped violent hints on the subject. Think of a sprite-of-all-work,
+recorded as being too proud to accept any regular payment even in fruit
+or grain, standing up brazenly before his mistress, his sly eyes fixed
+on her, drawling out this absurd, whimpering rhyme (for Piskies scorned
+to talk prose!):
+
+    Little Pisky, fair and slim,
+    Without a rag to cover him!
+
+With his lisp, and his funny snicker, and his winning impudence
+generally, don't you think he could have wheedled clothes out of a
+stone? Of course the lady humored him, and made him a costly, trimmed
+suit; and the ungrateful small beggar made off with it post-haste,
+chanting to another tune:
+
+    Pisky fine, Pisky gay!
+    Pisky now will run away.
+
+The moment the Brownie-folk could cut a respectable figure in
+fashionable garments, they turned their backs on an honest living, and
+skurried away to astonish the belles in Fairyland.
+
+Very much the same thing befell some German house-dwarves, who used to
+help a poor smith, and make his kettles and pans for him. They took
+their milk evening by evening, and went back gladly to their work, to
+the smith's great profit and pleasure. When he had grown rich, his
+thankful wife made them pretty crimson coats and caps, and laid both
+where the wee creatures might stumble on them. But when they had put the
+uniforms on, they shrieked "Paid off, paid off!" and, quitting a task
+half-done, returned no more.
+
+The Pisky was not alone in his bold request for his sordid little
+heart's desire. A certain Pueck lived thirty years in a monastery in
+Mecklenburg, Germany, doing faithful drudgery from his youth up; and one
+of the monks wrote, in his ingenious Latin, that on going away, all he
+asked was "_tunicam de diversis coloribus, et tintinnabulis plenam!_"
+You may put the goblin's vanity into English for yourselves. Brownie is
+known as Shelley-coat in parts of Scotland, from a German term meaning
+bell, as he wears a bell, like the Ruegen Dwarves, on his parti-colored
+coat.
+
+[Illustration: "_Tunicam de diversis coloribus, et tintinnabulis
+plenam!_" WAS ALL THAT PUeCK DEMANDED.]
+
+The famous Cauld Lad of Hilton was considered a Brownie. If everything
+was left well-arranged in the rooms, he amused himself by night with
+pitching chairs and vases about; but if he found the place in confusion,
+he kindly went to work and put it in exquisite order. But the Cauld Lad
+was, more likely, by his own confession, a ghost, and no true fairy.
+Romances were told of him, and he had been heard to sing this canticle,
+which makes you wonder whether he had ever heard of the House that Jack
+Built:
+
+                  Wae's me, wae's me!
+    The acorn's not yet fallen from the tree
+    That's to grow the wood that's to make the cradle
+    That's to rock the bairn that's to grow to the man
+                  That's to lay me!
+
+It was only ghosts who could be "laid," and to "lay" him meant to give
+him freedom and release, so that he need no longer go about in that
+bareboned and mournful state.
+
+But the merriest grig of all the Brownies was called in Southern
+Scotland, Wag-at-the-Wa'. He teased the kitchen-maids much by sitting
+under their feet at the hearth, or on the iron crook which hung from the
+beam in the chimney, and which, of old, was meant to accommodate pots
+and kettles. He loved children, and he loved jokes; his laugh was very
+distinct and pleasant; but if he heard of anybody drinking anything
+stronger than home-brewed ale, he would cough virtuously, and frown
+upon the company. Now Wag-at-the-Wa' had the toothache all the time,
+and, considering his twinges, was it not good of him to be so cheerful?
+He wore a great red-woollen coat and blue trousers, and sometimes a grey
+cloak over; and he shivered even then, with one side of his poor face
+bundled up, till his head seemed big as a cabbage. He looked impish and
+wrinkled, too, and had short bent legs. But his beautiful, clever tail
+atoned for everything, and with it, he kept his seat on the swinging
+crook.
+
+[Illustration: "WAG-AT-THE-WA'."]
+
+Scotch fairies called Powries and Dunters haunted lonely
+Border-mansions, and behaved like peaceable subjects, beating flax from
+year to year. The Dutch Kaboutermannekin worked in mills, as well as in
+houses. He was gentle and kind, but "touchy," as Brownie-people are.
+Though he dressed gayly in red, he was not pretty, but boasted a fine
+green tint on his face and hands. Little Killmoulis was a mill-haunting
+brother of his, who loved to lie before the fireplace in the kiln. This
+precious old employee was blest with a most enormous nose, and with no
+mouth at all! But he had a great appetite for pork, however he managed
+to gratify it.
+
+Bolieta, a Swiss Kobold, distinguished himself by leading cows safely
+through the dangerous mountain-paths, and keeping them sleek and happy.
+His branch of the family lived as often in the trunk of a near tree, as
+in the house itself.
+
+In Denmark and Sweden was the Kirkegrim, the "church lamb," who
+sometimes ran along the aisles and the choir after service-time, and to
+the grave-digger betokened the death of a little child. But there was
+another Kirkegrim, a proper church-Brownie, who kept the pews neat, and
+looked after people who misbehaved during the sermon.
+
+As queer as any of these was the Phynodderee, or the Hairy One, the Isle
+of Man house-helper. He was a wild little shaggy being, supposed to be
+an exile from fairy society, and condemned to wander about alone until
+doomsday. He was kind and obliging, and drove the sheep home, or
+gathered in the hay, if he saw a storm coming.
+
+The Klabautermann was a ship-Brownie, who sat under the capstan, and in
+time of danger, warned the crew by running up and down the shrouds in
+great excitement. This eccentric Flying Dutchman had a fiery red head,
+and on it a steeple-like hat; his yellow breeches were tucked into heavy
+horseman's boots.
+
+Huettchen was a German Brownie, who lived at court, but who dressed like
+a little peasant, with a flapping felt hat over his eyes. The Alraun, a
+sort of house-imp shorn of all his engaging diligence, was very small,
+his body being made of a root; he lived in a bottle. If he was thrown
+away, back he came, persistently as a rubber ball. But that instinct
+was common to the Brownie race.
+
+The Roman Penates, _Vinculi terrei_, which brave old Reginald Scott
+called "domesticall gods," were Brownie's venerable and honorable
+ancestors. We shall see presently what names their descendants bore in
+various countries. But the Russian Domovoi we shall not count among
+them, because they were ghostly, like the poor Cauld Lad, and seem to
+have been full-sized.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+OTHER HOUSE-HELPERS.
+
+
+IN modern Greece the Brownie was known as the Stoechia. He was called
+Para in Finland; Trasgo or Duende in Spain; Lutin, Gobelin, Follet, in
+France and Normandy; Niss-god-drange in Norway and Denmark; Tomte, in
+Sweden; Niss in Jutland, Denmark and Friesland; Bwbach or Pwcca in
+Wales; in Ireland, Fir-Darrig and, sometimes, Cluricaune; Kobold, in
+Germany; and in England, Brownie figured as Boggart, Puck, Hobgoblin,
+and Robin Goodfellow.
+
+Often the Stoechia, a wayward little black being, went about the house
+under the shape of a lizard or small snake. He was harmless; his
+presence was an omen of prosperity; and great care was taken that no
+disrespect was shown him.
+
+The services of the Para, who was a well-meaning rascal, were rather
+singular, and not at all indispensable. He had a way of following the
+neighbor's cows to pasture, and milking them himself, in a calf's
+fashion, until he had swallowed quart on quart, and was as full as a
+little hogshead. Then he went home, uncorked his thieving throat, and
+obligingly emptied every drop of his ill-gotten goods into his master's
+churn! How his feelings must have been hurt if anybody criticized the
+cheese and butter!
+
+The Spanish house-goblin was a statelier person, and wore an enormous
+plumed hat, and threw stones in a stolid and haughty manner at people he
+disliked. But occasionally the Duende had the form of a little busy
+friar, like the Monachiello at Naples.
+
+The Lutin, or Gobelin, or Follet of French belief, was likewise a
+stone-thrower. He was fond of children, and of horses; taking it upon
+himself to feed and caress his landlord's children when they were good,
+and to whip them when they were naughty; and he rode the willing horses,
+and combed them, and plaited their manes into knotty braids, for which,
+we may fear, the stable-boy never thanked him. He knew, too, how to
+worry and tease; and certain French mothers threatened troublesome
+little folk with the "Gobelin:" "_Le gobelin vous mangera!_" which we
+may translate into: "The goblin will gobble you!" or into the whimsical
+lines of an American poet:
+
+    The gobble uns'll git you,
+    Ef
+        You
+            Don't
+                  Watch
+                        Out!
+
+The Norwegian Nis was like a strong-shouldered child, in a coat and
+peaky cap, who carried a pretty blue light at night. He enjoyed hopping
+or skating across the farmyard under the moon's ray. Dogs he would not
+allow in his house. If he was first promised a gray sheep for his own,
+he would teach any one to play the violin. Like many another of the
+Brownie race, he was a dandy, and loved nothing better than fine
+clothes.
+
+Tomte of Sweden lived in a tree near the house. He was as tall as a
+year-old boy, with a knowing old face beneath his cap. In harvest-time
+he tugged away at one straw, or one grain, until he laid it in his
+master's barn; for his strength was not much greater than an ant's. If
+the farmer scorned his diligent little servant, and made fun of his tiny
+load, all luck departed from him, and the Tomte went away in anger. He
+liked tobacco, played merry pranks, and doubled up comically when he
+laughed. But he had another laugh, scoffing and sarcastic, which he
+sometimes gave at the top of his voice.
+
+Like the Devon Piskies, the Niss-Puk required water left at his disposal
+over-night. The Nis of Jutland was the Puk of Friesland. He also liked
+his porridge with butter. He lived under the roof, or in dark corners of
+the stable and house. He was of the Tomte's size; he wore red stockings
+on his stumpy little legs, and a pointed red cap, and a long gray or
+green coat. For soft, easy slippers he had a great longing; and if a
+pair were left out for him, he was soon heard shuffling in them over the
+floor. He had long arms, and a big head, and big bright eyes, so that
+the people of Silt have a saying concerning an inquisitive or astonished
+person: "He stares like a Puk." Puk, too, played sorry tricks on the
+servants, and was indignant if he was ever deprived of his nightly bowl
+of groute.
+
+The Bwbach of Wales churned the cream, and begged for his portion, like
+a true Brownie; he was a hairy blackamoor with the best-natured grin in
+the world. But he had an unpleasant habit of whisking mortals into the
+air, and doing flighty mischiefs generally.
+
+[Illustration: AN IRISH CLURICAUNE.]
+
+The unique Irish Cluricaune, who had that name in Cork, was called
+Luricaune and Leprechaun in other parts of the country. He differed from
+the Shefro in living alone, and in his queer appearance and habits. For
+though he was a house-spirit and did house-work, his ambitions ran in an
+opposite direction, and in his every spare minute, when he was not
+smoking or drinking, you might have seen him, a miniature old man, with
+a cocked hat, and a leather apron, sitting on a low stool, humming a
+fairy-tune, and perpetually cobbling at a pair of shoes no bigger than
+acorns. The shoes were occasionally captured and shown. And as we have
+seen, Mr. Cluricaune was a fortune-hunter, and a very wide-awake,
+versatile goblin altogether. In his capacity of Brownie, he once wreaked
+a hard revenge on a maid who served him shabbily. A Mr. Harris, a
+Quaker, had on his farm a Cluricaune named Little Wildbeam. Whenever the
+servants left the beer-barrel running through negligence, Little
+Wildbeam wedged himself into the cock, and stopped the flow, at great
+inconvenience to his poor little body, until some one came to turn the
+knob. So the master bade the cook always put a good dinner down cellar
+for Little Wildbeam. One Friday she had nothing but part of a herring,
+and some cold potatoes, which she left in place of the usual feast. That
+very midnight the fat cook got pulled out of bed, and thrown down the
+cellar-stairs, bumping from side to side, so that it made her very sore
+indeed, and meanwhile the smirking Cluricaune stood at the head of the
+steps, and sang at the luckless heap below:
+
+    Molly Jones, Molly Jones!
+    Potato-skin and herring-bones!
+    I'll knock your head against the stones,
+              Molly Jones!
+
+In Japanese houses, even, Brownies were familiar comers and goers. They
+were important and smooth-mannered pigmies, and serenely dealt out
+rewards and punishments as they saw fit. When they were engaged in
+befriending commendable boys and girls, their features had, somehow, the
+ingenious likeness of letters signifying "good;" and if they made it
+their business to plague and hinder naughty idlers, who, instead of
+doing their errands promptly, stopped at the shops to buy goodies, their
+queer little faces were screwed up to mean "bad," as you see in
+Japanese artists' pictures.
+
+[Illustration: JAPANESE CHILDREN AND BROWNIES.]
+
+The English names for the affable Brownie-folk bring to our minds the
+most wayward, frolicsome elves of all fairydom. Boggart was the
+Yorkshire sprite, and the Boggart commonly disliked children, and stole
+their food and playthings; wherein he differed from his kindly kindred.
+Hobgoblin (Hop-goblin) was so called because he hopped on one leg.
+Hobgoblin is the same as Rob or Bob-Goblin, a goblin whose full name
+seemed to be Robert. Robin Hood, the famous outlaw, dear to all of us,
+was thought to have been christened after Robin Hood the fairy, because
+he, too, was tricksy and sportive, wore a hood, and lived in the deep
+forest.
+
+[Illustration: A LITTLE FIR-DARRIG.]
+
+In Ireland lived the mocking, whimsical little Fir-Darrig, Robin
+Goodfellow's own twin. He dressed in tight-fitting red; Fir-Darrig
+itself meant "the red man." He had big humorous ears, and the softest
+and most flexible voice in the world, which could mimic any sound at
+will. He sat by the fire, and smoked a pipe, big as himself, belonging
+to the man of the house. He loved cleanliness, brought good-luck to his
+abode, and, like a cat, generally preferred places to people.
+
+Puck and Robin Goodfellow were the names best known and cherished.
+There is no doubt that Shakespeare, from whom we have now our prevailing
+idea of Puck, got the idea of him, in his turn, from the popular
+superstitions of his day. But Puck's very identity was all but
+forgotten, and since Shakespeare was, therefore, his poetical creator,
+we will forego mention of him here, and entitle Robin Goodfellow, the
+same "shrewd and meddling elf," under another nickname, the true Brownie
+of England.
+
+He was both House-Helper and Mischief-Maker, "the most active and
+extraordinary fellow of a fairy," says Ritson, "that we anywhere meet
+with." He was said to have had a supplementary brother called Robin
+Badfellow; but there was no need of that, because he was Robin Badfellow
+in himself, and united in his whimsical little character so many
+opposite qualities, that he may be considered the representative elf the
+world over; for the old Saxon Hudkin, the Niss of Scandinavia, and
+Knecht Ruprecht, the Robin of Germany, are nothing but our masquerading
+goblin-friend on continental soil. And in the red-capped smiling
+Mikumwess among the Passamaquoddy Indians, there he is again!
+
+By this name of Robin he was known earlier than the thirteenth century,
+and "famosed in everie olde wives' chronicle for his mad merrie
+prankes," two hundred years later. His biography was put forth in a
+black-letter tract in 1628, and in a yet better-known ballad which
+recited his jests, and was in free circulation while Queen Bess was
+reigning. The forgotten annalist says very heartily, alluding to his
+string of aliases:
+
+    But call him by what name you list;
+    I have studied on my pillow,
+    And think the name he best deserves
+    Is Robin, the Good Fellow!
+
+We class him rightly as a Brownie, because he skimmed milk, knew all
+about domestic life, and was the delight or terror of servants, as the
+case might be. He was fond of making a noise and clatter on the stairs,
+of playing harps, ringing bells, and misleading passing travellers; and
+despite his knavery, he came to be much beloved by his house-mates. Very
+like him was the German Hempelman, who laughed a great deal. But the
+laugh of Master Robin sometimes foreboded trouble and death to people,
+which Hempelman's never did.
+
+The jolly German Kobold had a laugh which filled his throat, and could
+be heard a mile away. Bu he was a gnome malignant enough if he was
+neglected or insulted. He very seldom made a mine-sprite of himself, but
+stayed at home, Brownie-like, and "ran" the house pretty much as he saw
+fit. To the Dwarves he was, however, closely related, and dressed after
+their fashion, except that sometimes he wore a coat of as many colors as
+the rainbow, with tinkling bells fastened to it. He objected to any
+chopping or spinning done on a Thursday. Change of servants, while he
+held his throne in the kitchen, affected him not in the least; for the
+maid going away recommended her successor to treat him civilly, at her
+peril. A very remarkable Kobold was Hinzelmann, who called himself a
+Christian, and came to the old castle of Huedemuehlen in 1584; whose
+history, too long to add here, is given charmingly in Mr. Keightley's
+Fairy Mythology.
+
+A certain bearded little Kobold lived with some fishermen in a hut, and
+tried a trick which was quite classic, and reminds one of the Greek
+story of Procrustes, which all of you have met with, or will meet with,
+some day. Says Mr. Benjamin Thorpe: "His chief amusement, when the
+fishermen were lying asleep at night, was to lay them even. For this
+purpose he would first draw them up until their heads all lay in a
+straight line, but then their legs would be out of the line! and he had
+to go to their feet and pull them up until the tips of their toes were
+all in a row. This game he would continue till broad daylight."
+
+Now all Brownies, Nissen, Kobolds and the rest, were very much of a
+piece, and when you know the virtues and faults of one of them, you know
+the habits of the race. So that you can understand, despite the slight
+but steady help given in household matters, that a person so variable
+and exacting and high-tempered as this curious little sprite might
+happen sometimes to be a great bore, and might inspire his master or
+mistress with the sighing wish to be rid of him. It was a tradition in
+Normandy that to shake off the Lutin or Gobelin, it was merely necessary
+to scatter flax-seed where he was wont to pass; for he was too neat to
+let it lie there, and yet tired so soon of picking it up, that he left
+it in disgust, and went away for good. And there was a sprite named
+Flerus who lived in a farm-house near Ostend, and worked so hard,
+sweeping and drawing water, and turning himself into a plough-horse that
+he might replace the old horse who was sick, for no reward, either, save
+a little fresh sugared milk--that soon his master was the wealthiest man
+in the neighborhood. But a giddy young servant-maid once offended him,
+at the day's end, by giving him garlic in his milk; and as soon as poor
+Flerus tasted it, he departed, very wrathful and hurt, from the
+premises, forever.
+
+There were few such successful instances on record. Though Brownie was
+ready, in every land under the sun, to leave home when he took the
+fancy, or when he was puffed up with gifts of lace and velvet, so that
+no mortal residence was gorgeous enough for him, yet he would take no
+hint, nor obey any command, when either pointed to a banishment.
+
+[Illustration: THE PERSISTENT KOBOLD OF KOePENICK.]
+
+Near Koepenick once, a man thought of buying a new house, and turning his
+back on a vexatious Kobold. The morning before he meant to change
+quarters, he saw his Kobold sitting by a pool, and asked him what he was
+doing. "I am doing my washing!" said the sharp rogue, "because we move
+to-morrow." And the man saw very well that as he could not avoid him, he
+had better take the little nuisance along. The same thing happened in
+the capital Polish anecdote of Iskrzycki (make your respects to his
+excruciating name!) and over Northern Europe the sarcastic joke "Yes,
+we're flitting!" prevails in folk-song and story.
+
+There is many and many an example of families selling the old house, and
+going off in great glee with the furniture, thinking the elf-rascal
+cheated and left behind; and lo! there he was, perched on a rope, or
+peering from a hole in the cart itself, on his congratulated master.
+
+The funniest hap of all befell an ungrateful farmer who fired his barn
+to burn the poor Kobold in it. As he was driving off, he turned to look
+at the blaze, and what should he see on the seat behind him but the same
+excited Kobold, chattering, monkey-like, and shrieking sympathizingly:
+"It was about time for us to get out of that, wasn't it?"
+
+The dark-skinned little house-sprites came to stay; and as for being
+snubbed, they were quite above it. They were the sort of callers to
+whom you could never show the door, with any dignity; for if you had
+done so, the grinning goblin would have examined knob and panels with a
+squinted eye, and gone back whistling to your easy-chair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+WATER-FOLK.
+
+
+OF old, there were Oreads and Naiads to people the rivers and the sea,
+but they were not fairies; and in after-years the beautiful, bright
+water-life of Greece, with its shells and dolphins, its palaces, its
+subaqueous music, and its happy-hearted maids and men, faded wholly out
+of memory. No one dominant race came to replace them. Merpeople, Tritons
+and Sirens we meet now and then, as did Hendrik Hudson's crew, and the
+Moruachs of Ireland, the Morverch (sea-daughters) of Brittainy; but
+they, too, were grown, and half-human. They were beautiful and swift,
+and usually sat combing their long hair, with a mirror in one hand, and
+their glossy tails tapering from the waist. The Danish Mermaid was
+gold-haired, cunning and treacherous; the Havmand or Merman was
+handsome, too, with black hair and beard, but kind and beneficent.
+
+The Swedish pair offered presents to those on shore, or passing in
+boats, in hopes to sink them beneath the waves.
+
+England and Ireland had no water-sprites which answered to the Nix and
+the Kelpie, only the Merrow, who was a Mermaid. She was a fair woman,
+with white, webbed fingers. She carried upon her head a little
+diving-cap, and when she came up to the rocks or the beach, she laid it
+by; but if it were stolen from her, she lost the power of returning to
+the sea. So that if her cap were taken by a young man, she very often
+could do nothing better than to marry him, and spend her time hunting
+for it up and down over his house. And once she had found it, she forgot
+all else but her desire to go home to "the kind sea-caves," and despite
+the calling of her neighbors and husband and children, she flitted to
+the shore, and plunged into the first oncoming billow, and walked the
+earth no longer.
+
+[Illustration: MER-FOLK.]
+
+Tales of these spirit-brides who suddenly deserted the green earth for
+their dear native waters, are common in Arabian and European folk-lore.
+And this characteristic was noted also in the Sea-trows of the Shetland
+Islands, who divested themselves of a shining fish-skin, and could not
+find the way to their ocean-beds if it were kept out of their reach. It
+was the Danish sailor's belief that seals laid by their skins every
+ninth night, and took maiden's forms wherewith to sport and sleep on the
+reefs. And for their capture as they were, warm, living and human, one
+had only to snatch and hide away their talisman-skin.
+
+The strange German Water-man wore a green hat, and when he opened his
+mouth, his teeth as well were green; he appeared to girls who passed his
+lake, and measured out ribbon, and flung it to them.
+
+But we must search for smaller sprites than these.
+
+The little water-fairies who devoted themselves to drawing under
+whomsoever encroached on their pools and brooks, were called Nixies in
+Germany, Korrigans (for this was part of their office) in Brittainy;
+Ondins about Magdebourg, and Roussalkis, the long-haired, smiling ones,
+among the Slavic people.
+
+[Illustration: THE LITTLE OLD NIX NEAR GHENT.]
+
+The engaging Nixies were very minute and mischievous, and abounded in
+the Shetland Isles and Cornwall, as did, moreover, the Kelpies, who were
+like tiny horses, known even in China; sporting on the margin, and
+foreboding death by drowning, to any who beheld them; or tempting
+passers-by to mount, and plunging, with their victims, headlong into
+the deep. The Nix-lady was recognized when she came on shore by the
+edges of her dress or apron being perpetually wet. The dark-eyed Nix-man
+with his seaweed hair and his wide hat, was known by his slit ears and
+feet, which he was very careful to conceal. Once in a while he was
+observed to be half-fish. The naked Nixen were draped with moss and
+kelp; but when they were clothed, they seemed merely little men and
+women, save that the borders of their garments, dripping water, betrayed
+them. They did their marketing ashore, wheresoever they were, and,
+according to all accounts, with a sharp eye to economy. Like the
+land-elves, they loved to dance and sing. Nix did not favor divers,
+fishermen, and other intruders on his territory, and he did his best to
+harm them. He was altogether a fierce, grudging, covetous little
+creature. His comelier wife was much better-natured, and befriended
+human beings to the utmost of her power.
+
+[Illustration: THE WORK OF THE NICKEL.]
+
+Near Ghent was a little old Nix who lived in the Scheldt; he cried and
+sighed much, and did mischief to no one. It grieved him when children
+ran away from him, yet if they asked what troubled his conscience, he
+only sighed heavily, and disappeared.
+
+The modern Greeks believed in a black sprite haunting wells and springs,
+who was fond of beckoning to strangers. If they came to him, he bestowed
+gifts upon them; if not, he never seemed angry, but turned patiently to
+wait for the next passer-by.
+
+There was a curious sea-creature in Norway, who swam about as a thin
+little old man with no head. About the magical Isle of Ruegen lived the
+Nickel. His favorite game was to astonish the fishers, by hauling their
+boats up among the trees.
+
+At Arles and other towns near the Spanish border in France, were the
+Dracs, who inhabited clear pools and streams, and floated along in the
+shape of gold rings and cups, so that women and children bathing should
+grasp them, and be lured under.
+
+The Indian water-manittos, the Nibanaba, were winning in appearance, and
+wicked in disposition. They, joining the Pukwudjinies, helped to kill
+Kwasind.
+
+In Wales were the Gwragedd Annwn, elves who loved the stillness of
+lonely mountain-lakes, and who seldom ventured into the upper world.
+They had their own submerged towns and battlements; and from their
+little sunken city the fairy-bells sent out, ever and anon, muffled
+silver voices. The Gwragedd Annwn were not fishy-finned, nor were they
+ever dwellers in the sea; for in Wales were no mermaid-traditions, nor
+any tales of those who beguiled mortals--
+
+    Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.
+
+The Neck and the Stroemkarl of Swedish rivers were two little chaps with
+hardly a hair's breadth of difference. Either appeared under various
+shapes; now as a green-hatted old man with a long beard, out of which he
+wrung water as he sat on the cliffs; now loitering of a summer night on
+the surface, like a chip of wood or a leaf, he seemed a fair child,
+harping, with yellow ringlets falling from beneath a high red cap to his
+shoulders. Both fairies had a genius for music; and the Stroemkarl,
+especially, had one most marvellous tune to which he put eleven
+variations. Now, to ten of them any one might dance decorously, and with
+safety; but at the eleventh, which was the enchanted one, all the world
+went mad; and tables, belfries, benches, houses, windmills, trees,
+horses, cripples, babies, ghosts, and whole towns full of sedate
+citizens began capering on the banks about the invisible player, and
+kept it up in furious fashion until the last note died away.
+
+You know that the wren was hunted in certain countries on a certain day.
+Well, here is one legend about her. There was a malicious fairy once in
+the Isle of Man, very winsome to look at, who worked a sorry
+Kelpie-trick, on the young men of the town, and inveigled them into the
+sea, where they perished. At last the inhabitants rose in vengeance, and
+suspecting her of causing their loss and sorrow, gave her chase so hard
+and fast by land, that to save herself, she changed her shape into that
+of an innocent brown wren. And because she had been so treacherous, a
+spell was cast upon her, inasmuch as she was obliged every New Year's
+Day to fly about as that same bird, until she should be killed by a
+human hand. And from sunrise to sunset, therefore, on the first bleak
+day of January, all the men and boys of the island fired at the poor
+wrens, and stoned them, and entrapped them, in the hope of reaching the
+one guilty fairy among them. And as they could never be sure that they
+had captured the right one, they kept on year by year, chasing and
+persecuting the whole flock. But every dead wren's feather they
+preserved carefully, and believed that it hindered them from drowning
+and shipwreck for that twelvemonth; and they took the feathers with them
+on voyages great and small, in order that the bad fairy's magic may
+never be able to prevail, as it had prevailed of yore with their unhappy
+brothers.
+
+The presence of the sea-fairies had a terror in it, and against their
+arts only the strongest and most watchful could hope to be victorious.
+Their sport was to desolate peaceful homes, and bring destruction on
+gallant ships. They, dwelling in streams and in the ocean, the world
+over, were like the waters they loved: gracious and noble in aspect, and
+meaning danger and death to the unwary. We fear that, like the
+earth-fairies, they were heartless quite.
+
+[Illustration: HOB IN HOBHOLE]
+
+But it may be that the gentle Nixies had only a blind longing for human
+society, and would not willingly have wrought harm to the creatures of
+another element. We are more willing to urge excuses for their
+wrong-doing than for the like fault in our frowzly under-ground folk;
+for ugliness seems, somehow, not so shocking when allied with evil as
+does beauty, which was destined for all men's delight and uplifting. As
+the air-elves had their Fairyland whither mortal children wandered, and
+whence they returned after an unmeasured lapse of time, still children,
+to the ivy-grown ruins of their homes, so the water-elves had a reward
+for those they snatched from earth; and legends assure us the
+wave-rocked prisoners a hundred fathoms down, never grew old, but kept
+the flush of their last morning rosy ever on their brows.
+
+Among a little community full of guile, there is great comfort in
+spotting one honest, kind water-boy, who, not content with being
+harmless, as were the Flemish and Grecian Nixies, put himself to work to
+do good, and charm away some of the worries and ills that burdened the
+upper world. His name was Hob, and he lived in Hobhole, which was a cave
+scooped out by the beating tides in old Northumbria.
+
+The lean pockets of the neighboring doctors were partly attributed to
+this benignant little person; for he set up an opposition, and his
+specialty was the cure of whooping-cough. Many a Scotch mother took her
+lad or lass to the spray-covered mouth of the wise goblin's cave, and
+sang in a low voice:
+
+            Hobhole Hob!
+    Ma bairn's gotten t' kink-cough:
+    Tak't off! tak't off!
+
+And so he did, sitting there with his toes in the sea. For Hobhole Hob's
+small sake, we can afford to part friends with the whole naughty race of
+water-folk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MISCHIEF-MAKERS.
+
+
+THE fairy-fellows who made a regular business of mischief-making seemed
+to have two favorite ways of setting to work. They either saddled
+themselves with little boys and spilled them, sooner or later, into the
+water, or else they danced along holding a twinkling light, and led any
+one so foolish as to follow them a pretty march into chasms and
+quagmires. Their jokes were grim and hurtful, and not merely funny, like
+Brownie's; for Brownie usually gave his victims (except in Molly Jones's
+case) nothing much worse than a pinch. So people came to have great awe
+and horror of the heartless goblins who waylaid travellers, and left
+them broken-limbed or dead.
+
+Very often quarrelsome, disobedient or vicious folk fell into the snare
+of a Kelpie, or a Will-o'-the-Wisp; for the little whipper-snappers had
+a fine eye for poetical justice, and dealt out punishments with the
+nicest discrimination. We never hear that they troubled good, steady
+mortals; but only that sometimes they beguiled them, for sheer love,
+into Fairyland.
+
+We know that all "ouphes and elves" could change their shapes at will;
+therefore when we spy fairy-horses, fairy-lambs, and such quadrupeds, we
+guess at once that they are only roguish small gentlemen masquerading.
+Never for the innocent fun of it, either; but alas! to bring silly
+persons to grief.
+
+In Hampshire, in England, was a spirit known as Coltpixy, which, itself
+shaped like a miniature neighing horse, beguiled other horses into bogs
+and morasses. The Irish Pooka or Phooka was a horse too, and a famous
+rascal. He lived on land, and was something like the Welsh Gwyll: a
+tiny, black, wicked-faced wild colt, with chains dangling about him.
+Again, he frisked around in the shape of a goat or a bat. Spenser has
+him:
+
+    "Ne let the Pouke, ne other evill spright, . . .
+     Ne let hobgoblins, names whose sense we see not,
+     Fray us with things that be not."
+
+"Fray," as you are likely to guess, means to frighten or to scare.
+
+[Illustration: THE IRISH POOKA WAS A HORSE TOO.]
+
+Kelpies, who were Scotch, haunted fords and ferries, especially in
+storms; allured bystanders into the water, or swelled the river so that
+it broke the roads, and overwhelmed travellers.
+
+Very like them were the Brag, the little Shoopil-tree of the Shetland
+Islands, and the Nick, who was the Icelandic Nykkur-horse; gamesome
+deceivers all, who enticed children and others to bestride them, and who
+were treacherous as a quicksand, every time. And there were many more of
+the Kelpie kingdom, of whom we can hunt up no clews.
+
+A man who saw a Kelpie gave himself up for lost; for he was sure, by
+hook or crook, to meet his death by drowning. Kelpie, familiar so far
+away as China, never stayed in the next-door countries, Ireland or
+England, long enough to be recognized. They knew nothing of him by
+sight, nor of the Nix his cousin, nor of anything resembling them. In
+Ireland lived the merrow; but she was only an amiable mermaid.
+
+[Illustration: WILL-O'-THE-WISP.]
+
+The Japanese had a water-dragon called Kappa, "whose office it was to
+swallow bad boys who went to swim in disobedience to their parents'
+commands, and at improper times and places." In the River Tees was a
+green-haired lady named Peg Powler, and in some streams in Lancashire
+one christened Jenny Greenteeth; two hungry goblins whose only
+delight was to drown and devour unlucky travellers. But we know already
+that the water-sprites were more than likely so to behave.
+
+In Provence there is a tale told of seven little boys who went out at
+night against their grandmother's wishes. A little dark pony came
+prancing up to them, and the youngest clambered on his sleek back, and
+after him, the whole seven, one after the other, which was quite a
+wonderful weight for the wee creature; but his back meanwhile kept
+growing longer and larger to accommodate them. As they galloped along,
+the children called such of their playmates as were out of doors, to
+join them, the obliging nag stretching and stretching until thirty pairs
+of young legs dangled at his sides! when he made straight for the sea,
+and plunged in, and drowned them all.
+
+The Piskies, or Pigseys, of Cornwall, were naughty and unsociable. Their
+great trick was to entice people into marshes, by making themselves look
+like a light held in a man's hand, or a light in a friendly cottage
+window. Pisky also rode the farmers' colts hard, and chased the
+farmers' cows. For all his diabolics, you had to excuse him in part,
+when you heard his hearty fearless laugh; it was so merry and sweet. "To
+laugh like a Pisky," passed into a proverb. The Barguest of Yorkshire,
+like the Osschaert of the Netherlands, was an open-air bugaboo whose
+presence always portended disaster. Sometimes he appeared as a horse or
+dog, merely to play the old trick with a false light, and to vanish,
+laughing.
+
+The Tueckebold was a very malicious chap, carrying a candle, who lived in
+Hanover; his blood-relation in Scandinavia was the Lyktgubhe. Over in
+Flanders and Brabant was one Kludde, a fellow whisking here and there as
+a half-starved little mare, or a cat, or a frog, or a bat; but who was
+always accompanied by two dancing blue flames, and who could overtake
+any one as swiftly as a snake. The Ellydan (dan is a Welsh word meaning
+fire, and also a lure or a snare: a luring elf-fire) was a rogue with
+wings, wide ears, a tall cap and two huge torches, who precisely
+resembled the English Will-o'-the-Wisp, the Scandinavian Lyktgubhe and
+the Breton Sand Yan y Tad. Our American negroes make him out
+Jack-muh-Lantern: a vast, hairy, goggle-eyed, big-mouthed ogre, leaping
+like a giant grasshopper, and forcing his victims into a swamp, where
+they died. The gentlemen of this tribe preferred to walk abroad at
+night, like any other torchlight procession. Their little bodies were
+invisible, and the traveller who hurried towards the pleasant lamp
+ahead, never knew that he was being tricked by a grinning fairy, until
+he stumbled on the brink of a precipice, or found himself knee-deep in a
+bog. Then the brazen little guide shouted outright with glee, put out
+his mysterious flame, and somersaulted off, leaving the poor tourist to
+help himself. The only way to escape his arts was to turn your coat
+inside out.
+
+You may guess that the ungodly wights had plenty of fun in them, by this
+anecdote: A great many Scotch Jack-o'-Lanterns, as they are often
+called, were once bothering the horse belonging to a clergyman, who with
+his servant, was returning home late at night. The horse reared and
+whinnied, and the clergyman was alarmed, for a thousand impish fires
+were waltzing before the wheels. Like a good man, he began to pray
+aloud, to no avail. But the servant just roared: "Wull ye be aff noo, in
+the deil's name!" and sure enough, in a wink, there was not a goblin
+within gunshot.
+
+[Illustration: PISKY ALSO CHASED THE FARMERS' COWS.]
+
+There were some freakish fairies in old England, whose names were
+Puckerel, Hob Howland, Bygorn, Bogleboe, Rawhead or Bloodybones; the
+last two were certainly scarers of nurseries.
+
+The Boggart was a little spectre who haunted farms and houses, like
+Brownie or Nis; but he was usually a sorry busybody, tearing the
+bed-curtains, rattling the doors, whistling through the keyholes,
+snatching his bread-and-butter from the baby, playing pranks upon the
+servants, and doing all manner of mischief.
+
+[Illustration: RED COMB WAS A TYRANT.]
+
+The Dunnie, in Northumberland, was fond of annoying farmers. When night
+came, he gave them and himself a rest, and hung his long legs over the
+crags, whistling and banging his idle heels. Red Comb or Bloody Cap was
+a tyrant who lived in every Border castle, dungeon and tower. He was
+short and thickset long-toothed and skinny-fingered, with big red eyes,
+grisly flowing hair, and iron boots; a pikestaff in his left hand, and a
+red cap on his ugly head.
+
+The village of Hedley, near Ebchester, in England, was haunted by a
+churlish imp known far and wide as the Hedley Gow. He took the form of a
+cow, and amused himself at milking-time with kicking over the pails,
+scaring the maids, and calling the cats, of whom he was fond, to lick up
+the cream. Then he slipped the ropes and vanished, with a great laugh.
+In Northern Germany we find the Hedley Gow's next-of-kin, and there,
+too, were little underground beings who accompanied maids and men to the
+milking, and drank up what was spilt; but if nothing happened to be
+spilt in measuring out the quarts, they got angry, overturned the pails,
+and ran away. These jackanapes were a foot and a half high, and dressed
+in black, with red caps.
+
+Many ominous fairies, such as the Banshee, portended misfortune and
+death. The Banshee had a high shrill voice, and long hair. Once in a
+while she seemed to be as tall as an ordinary woman, very thin, with
+head uncovered, and a floating white cloak, wringing her hands and
+wailing. She attached herself only to certain ancient Irish families,
+and cried under their windows when one of their race was sick, and
+doomed to die. But she scorned families who had a dash of Saxon and
+Norman ancestry, and would have nothing to do with them.
+
+Every single fairy that ever was known to the annals of this world was,
+at times, a mischief-maker. He could no more keep out of mischief than a
+trout out of water. What lives the dandiprats led our poor
+great-great-great-great grand-sires! As a very clever living writer put
+it:
+
+      "A man could not ride out without risking an encounter
+      with a Puck or a Will-o'-the Wisp. He could not
+      approach a stream in safety unless he closed his ears
+      to the sirens' songs, and his eyes to the fair form of
+      the mermaid. In the hillside were the dwarfs, in the
+      forest Queen Mab and her court. Brownie ruled over him
+      in his house, and Robin Goodfellow in his walks and
+      wanderings. From the moment a Christian came into the
+      world until his departure therefrom, he was at the
+      mercy of the fairy-folk, and his devices to elude them
+      were many. Unhappy was the mother who neglected to lay
+      a pair of scissors or of tongs, a knife or her
+      husband's breeches, in the cradle of her new-born
+      infant; for if she forgot, then was she sure to
+      receive a changeling in its place. Great was the loss
+      of the child to whose baptism the fairies were not
+      invited, or the bride to whose wedding the Nix, or
+      water-spirit, was not bidden. If the inhabitants of
+      Thale did not throw a black cock annually into the
+      Bode, one of them was claimed as his lawful victim by
+      the Nickelmann dwelling in that stream. The Russian
+      peasant who failed to present the Rusalka or
+      water-sprite he met at Whitsuntide, with a
+      handkerchief, or a piece torn from his or her
+      clothing, was doomed to death."
+
+One had to be ever on the lookout to escape the sharp little immortals,
+whose very kindness to men and women was a species of coquetry, and who
+never spared their friends' feelings at the expense of their own saucy
+delight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+PUCK; AND POETS' FAIRIES.
+
+
+PUCK, as we said, is Shakespeare's fairy. There is some probability that
+he found in Cwm Pwca, or Puck Valley, a part of the romantic glens of
+Clydach, in Breconshire, the original scenes of his fanciful _Midsummer
+Night's Dream_. This glen used to be crammed with goblins. There, and in
+many like-named Welsh places, Puck's pranks were well-remembered by old
+inhabitants. This Welsh Puck was a queer little figure, long and
+grotesque, and looked something like a chicken half out of his shell; at
+least, so a peasant drew him, from memory, with a bit of coal. Pwcca, or
+Pooka, in Wales, was but another name for Ellydan; and his favorite joke
+was also to travel along before a wayfarer, with a lantern held over his
+head, leading miles and miles, until he got to the brink of a
+precipice. Then the little wretch sprang over the chasm, shouted with
+wicked glee, blew out his lantern, and left the startled traveller to
+reach home as best he could. Old Reginald Scott must have had this sort
+of a Puck in mind when he put Kitt-with-the-Candlestick, whose identity
+troubled the critics much, in his catalogue of "bugbears."
+
+The very old word Pouke meant the devil, horns, tail, and all; from that
+word, as it grew more human and serviceable, came the Pixy of
+Devonshire, the Irish Phooka, the Scottish Bogle, and the Boggart in
+Yorkshire; and even one nursery-tale title of Bugaboo. Oddest of all,
+the name Pug, which we give now to an amusing race of small dogs, is an
+every-day reminder of poor lost Puck, and of the queer changes which,
+through a century or two, may befall a word. Puck was considered
+court-jester, a mild, comic, playful creature:
+
+                A little random elf
+    Born in the sport of Nature, like a weed,
+    For simple sweet enjoyment of myself,
+    But for no other purpose, worth or need;
+    And yet withal of a most happy breed.
+
+But he kept to the last his character of practical joker, and his
+alliance with his grim little cousins, the Lyktgubhe and the Kludde.
+Glorious old Michael Drayton made a verse of his naughty tricks, which
+you shall hear:
+
+      This Puck seems but a dreaming dolt,
+    Still walking like a ragged colt,
+    And oft out of a bush doth bolt
+    On purpose to deceive us;
+    And leading us, makes us to stray
+    Long winter nights out of the way:
+    And when we stick in mire and clay,
+    He doth with laughter leave us.
+
+Shakespeare, who calls him a "merry wanderer of the night," and allows
+him to fly "swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow," was the first to
+make Puck into a house spirit. The poets were especially attentive to
+the offices of these house-spirits.
+
+According to them, Mab and Puck do everything in-doors which we think
+characteristic of a Brownie. William Browne, born in Tavistock, in the
+county of Devon, where the Pixies lived, prettily puts it how the
+fairy-queen did--
+
+                    ----command her elves
+    To pinch those maids that had not swept their shelves;
+    And further, if by maiden's oversight,
+    Within doors water was not brought at night,
+    Or if they spread no table, set no bread,
+    They should have nips from toe unto the head!
+    And for the maid who had performed each thing
+    She in the water-pail bade leave a ring.
+
+[Illustration: THE WELSH PUCK.]
+
+Herrick confirms what we have just heard:
+
+      If ye will with Mab find grace,
+    Set each platter in its place;
+    Rake the fire up, and get
+    Water in ere the sun be set;
+    Wash your pails, and cleanse your dairies;
+    Sluts are loathsome to the fairies!
+    Sweep your house: who doth not so,
+    Mab will pinch her by the toe.
+
+John Lyly, in his very beautiful _Mayde's Metamorphosis_ has this
+charming fairy song, which takes us out to the grass, and the soft night
+air, and the softer starshine:
+
+    By the moon we sport and play;
+    With the night begins our day;
+    As we dance, the dew doth fall.
+    Trip it, little urchins all!
+    Lightly as the little bee,
+    Two by two, and three by three,
+    And about go we, and about go we.
+
+[Illustration: A MERRY NIGHT-WANDERER.]
+
+What a picture of the wee tribe at their revels! Here is another, from
+Ben Jonson's _Sad Shepherd_:
+
+      Span-long elves that dance about a pool,
+    With each a little changeling in her arms.
+
+In what is thought to be Lyly's play, just mentioned, Mopso, Joculo, and
+Prisio have something in the way of a pun for each fairy they address:
+
+    _Mop._: I pray you, what might I call you?
+
+    _1st Fairy_: My name is Penny.
+
+    _Mop._: I am sorry I cannot purse you!
+
+    _Pris._: I pray you, sir, what might I call you?
+
+    _2nd Fairy_: My name is Cricket.
+
+(Mr. Keightley says that the Crickets were a family of great note in
+Fairyland: many poets celebrated them.)
+
+    _Pris._: I would I were a chimney for your sake!
+
+    _Joc._: I pray you, you pretty little fellow, what's your
+    name?
+
+    _3rd Fairy_: My name is Little Little Prick.
+
+    _Joc._: Little Little Prick! O you are a dangerous fairy,
+    and fright all the little wenches in the country out of their
+    beds. I care not whose hand I were in, so I were out of
+    yours.
+
+Drayton, again, gives us a list of tinkling elfin-ladies' names, which
+are pleasant to hear as the drip of an icicle:
+
+      Hop and Mop and Drop so clear,
+    Pip and Trip and Skip that were
+    To Mab their sovereign ever dear,
+    Her special maids-of-honor:
+
+    Pib and Tib and Pinck and Pin,
+    Tick and Quick, and Jil and Jin,
+    Tit and Nit, and Wap and Win,
+    The train that wait upon her!
+
+[Illustration: "BY THE MOON WE SPORT AND PLAY."]
+
+Young Randolph has an equally delightful account in the pastoral drama
+of _Amyntas_, of his wee folk orchard-robbing; whose chorused Latin
+Leigh Hunt thus translates, roguishly enough:
+
+      We the fairies blithe and antic,
+    Of dimensions not gigantic,
+    Tho' the moonshine mostly keep us,
+    Oft in orchard frisk and peep us.
+
+    Stolen sweets are always sweeter;
+    Stolen kisses much completer;
+    Stolen looks are nice in chapels;
+    Stolen, stolen, be our apples!
+
+    When to bed the world is bobbing,
+    Then's the time for orchard-robbing:
+    Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
+    Were it not for stealing, stealing!
+
+You will notice that Shakespeare places his Gothic goblins in the woods
+about Athens, a place where real fairies never set their rose-leaf feet,
+but where once sported yet lovelier Dryads and Naiads. These dainty
+British Greeks are very small indeed: Titania orders them to make war on
+the rear-mice, and make coats of their leathern wings. Mercutio's Queen
+Mab is scarce bigger than a snowflake. Prospero, in _The Tempest_,
+commands, besides his "delicate Ariel," all
+
+    --elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves.
+
+The make-believe fairies in _The Merry Wives_ know how to pinch
+offenders black and blue. The shepherd, in the _Winter's Tale_, takes
+the baby Perdita for a changeling. So that all the Shakespeare people
+seem wise in goblin-lore.
+
+You see that we have looked for the literature of our pretty friends
+only among the old poets, and only English poets at that; but the
+foreign fairies are no less charming. Chaucer and Spenser loved the
+brood especially. Robert Herrick knew all about
+
+    --the elves also,
+    Whose little eyes glow;
+
+Sidney smiled on them once or twice, and great Milton could spare them a
+line out of his majestic verse. But the high-tide of their praise was
+ebbing already when Dryden and Pope were writing. Lesser poets than any
+of these, Parnell and Tickell, wrote fairy tales, but they lack the
+relish of the honeyed rhymes Drayton, Lyly, and supreme Shakespeare,
+give us. Keats was drawn to them, though he has left us but sweet and
+brief proof of it; and Thomas Hood, of all gentle modern poets, has
+done most for the "small foresters and gay." In prose the fairies are
+"famoused" east and west; for which they may sing their loudest canticle
+to the good Brothers Grimm, in Fairyland. The arts have been their
+handmaids; and some of this world's most lovable spirits have delighted
+to do them merry honor: Mendelssohn in his quicksilver orchestral music,
+and dear Richard Doyle in the quaintest drawings that ever fell,
+laughing, from a pencil-point.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELVES WHOSE LITTLE EYES GLOW.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CHANGELINGS.
+
+
+KIDNAPPING was a favorite pastime with our small friends, and a great
+many reasons concurred to make it a necessary and thriving trade. We are
+told that both the Tylwyth Teg and the Korrigans had a fear that their
+frail race was dying out, and sought to steal hearty young children, and
+leave the wee, bright, sickly "changeling," or ex-changeling, in its
+place. That sounds like a quibble; for we know that fairies were free
+from the shadow of death, and could not possibly dread any lessening of
+their numbers from the old, old cause. Yet we saw that the air-elves
+held pitched battles, and murdered one another like gallant soldiers,
+from the world's beginning; and again comes a straggling little proof to
+make us suspect that they had not quite the immortality they boasted.
+However, we pass it by, sure at least that the philosopher who first
+observed the merry goblins to be at bottom wavering and disconsolate,
+recognized an instance of it in this pathetic eagerness to adopt babies
+not their own. Fairy-folk were believed, in general, to have power over
+none but unbaptized children.
+
+A tradition older and wider than the Tylwyth Teg's runs that a yearly
+tribute was due from Fairyland to the prince of the infernal regions, as
+poor King AEgeus had once to pay Minos of Crete with the seven fair boys
+and girls; and that, for the sake of sparing their own dear ones, the
+little beings, in their fantastic dress, flew east and west on an
+anxious hunt for human children, who might be captured and delivered
+over to bondage instead. And they crept cautiously to many a cradle, and
+having secured the sleeping innocent, "plucked the nodding nurse by the
+nose," as Ben Jonson said, and vanished with a scream of triumphant
+laughter. Welsh fairies have been caught in the very act of the theft,
+and a pretty fight they made, every time, to keep their booty; but the
+strength of a man or a woman, was, of course, too much for them to
+resist long.
+
+Now, whenever a mother, who, you may count upon it, thought her own
+urchin most beautiful of all under the moon, found him growing cross and
+homely, in despite of herself, she suddenly awoke to this view of the
+case: that the dwindled babe was her babe no longer, but a miserable
+young gosling from Fairyland slipped into its place. A miserable young
+foreign gosling it was from that hour, though it had her own
+grandfather's special kind of a nose on its unmistakable face.
+
+The discovery always made a great sensation; people came from the
+surrounding villages to wonder at the lean, gaping, knowing-eyed small
+stranger in the crib, and to propose all sorts of charms which should
+rid the house of his presence, and restore the rightful heir again. They
+were not especially polite to the poor changeling. In Denmark, and in
+Ireland as well, they dandled him on a hot shovel! If he were really a
+changeling, the fairies, rather than see him singed, were sure to
+appear in a violent fluster and whisk him away, and at the same minute
+to drop its former owner plump into the cradle. And if it were not a
+changeling, how did those queer by-gone mammas know when to stop the
+broiling and baking?
+
+Mr. George Waldron, who in 1726 wrote an entertaining _Description of
+the Isle of Man_, recorded it that he once went to see a baby supposed
+to be a changeling; that it seemed to be four or five years old, but
+smaller than an infant of six months, pale, and silky-haired, and (what
+was unusual) with the fairest face under heaven; that it was not able to
+walk nor to move a joint, seldom smiled, ate scarcely anything, and
+never spoke nor cried; but that if you called it a fairy-elf, it fixed
+its gaze on you as if it would look you through. If it were left alone,
+it was overheard laughing and frolicking, and when it was taken up
+after, limp as cloth, its hair was found prettily combed, and there were
+signs that it had been washed and dressed by its unseen playfellows.
+
+The main point to put the family mind at rest on the matter, was to
+make the changeling "own up," force him to do something which no tender
+mortal in socks and bibs ever was able to do, such as dance, prophesy,
+or manage a musical instrument. There was an Irish changeling, the
+youngest of five sons, who, being teased, snatched a bagpipe from a
+visitor, and played upon it in the most accomplished and melting manner,
+sitting up in his wooden chair, his big goggle-eyes fixed on the
+company. And when he knew he was found out, he sprang, bagpipe and all,
+into the river; which leads one to suspect that he was a sort of stray
+Stroemkarl.
+
+[Illustration: THERE WAS AN IRISH CHANGELING.]
+
+The Welsh fairies had good taste, and admired wholesome and handsome
+children. They stole such often, and left for substitute the
+plentyn-newid (the change-child) who at first was exactly like the
+absent nursling, but soon grew ugly, shrivelled, biting, wailing,
+cunning and ill-tempered. In the hope of proving whether it were a
+fairy-waif or not, people put the little creature to such hard tests,
+that sometimes it nearly died of acquaintance with a rod, or an oven, or
+a well.
+
+[Illustration: "THE ACORN BEFORE THE OAK HAVE I SEEN."]
+
+If the bereaved parent did some very astonishing thing in plain view of
+the wonder-chick, that would generally entrap it into betraying its
+secrets. A French changeling was once moved unawares to sing out that it
+was nine hundred years old, at least! In Wales, and also in Brittainy
+(which are sister-countries of one race) the following story is current:
+A mother whose infant had been spirited away, and who was much perplexed
+over what she took to be a changeling, was advised to cook a meal for
+ten farm-servants in one egg-shell. When the queer little creature,
+burning with curiosity, asked her from his high-chair what she was
+about, she could hardly answer, so excited was she to hear him speak. At
+that he cried louder: "A meal for ten, dear mother, in one egg-shell?
+The acorn before the oak have I seen, and the wilderness before the
+lawn, but never did I behold anything like that!" and so gave damaging
+evidence of his age and his unlucky wisdom. And the woman replied: "You
+have seen altogether too much, my son, and you shall have a beating!"
+And thereupon she began to thrash him, until he screeched, and a fairy
+appeared hurriedly to rescue him, and in the crib lay the round, rosy,
+real child, who had been missing a long while.
+
+Now the "gentry" of modern Greece had an eye also to clever children;
+but they almost always brought them back, laden with gifts, lovelier in
+person than when they were taken from home. And if they appointed a
+changeling in the meantime (which they were not very apt to do) it never
+showed its elfin nature until it was quite grown up! unlike the uncanny
+goblins who were all too ready from the first to give autobiographies on
+the slightest hint.
+
+The Drows of the Orkney Islands fancied larger game. They used to stalk
+in among church congregations and carry off pious deacons and
+deaconesses! So wrote one Lucas Jacobson Debes, in 1670.
+
+In a pretty Scotch tale, a sly fairy threatened to steal the "lad
+bairn," unless the mother could tell the fairy's right name. The latter
+was a complete stranger, and the woman was sore worried; and went to
+walk in the woods to ease her anxious and aching heart, and to think
+over some means of outwitting the enemy of her boy. And presently she
+heard a faint voice singing under a leaf:
+
+      Little kens the gude dame at hame
+    That Whuppity Stoorie is ma name!
+
+When the smart lady in green came to take the beautiful "lad bairn," the
+mother quietly called her "Whuppity Stoorie!" and off she hurried with a
+cry of fear; like the Austrian dwarf Kruzimuegeli, the "dear Ekke
+Nekkepem" of Friesland, and many another who tried to play the same
+trick, and who were always themselves the means of telling mortals the
+very names they would conceal.
+
+[Illustration: SHE HEARD A FAINT VOICE SINGING UNDER A LEAF.]
+
+Fairy-folk young and old were coquettish enough about their names, and
+greatly preferred they should not be spoken outright. This habit got
+them into many a scrape. The anecdote of "Who hurt you? Myself!" was
+told in Spain, Finland, Brittainy, Japan, and a dozen other kingdoms,
+and seems to be as old as the Odyssey. Do you remember where Ulysses
+tells the Cyclop that his name is Outis, which means Nobody? and how,
+after the eye of the wicked Polyphemus has been put out, the comrades
+of the big blinded fellow ask him who did the deed, and he growls back,
+very sensibly: "Nobody!" Consider what follows a typical modern version
+of the same trick.
+
+[Illustration: "AINSEL."]
+
+A young Scotch child, whom we will call Alan, sits by the fire, when a
+pretty creature the size of a doll, waltzes down the chimney to the
+hearth, and begins to frolic. When asked its name it says shrewdly:
+"Ainsel"; which to the boy sounds like what it really is, "Ownself," and
+makes him, when it is his turn to be questioned, as saucy and reticent
+as he supposes his elfin playfellow to be. So Alan tells the sprite that
+his name is "_My_ Ainsel," and gets the better of it. For bye-and-bye
+they wax very frisky and friendly, and right in the middle of their
+sport, when little Alan pokes the fire, and gets a spark by chance on
+Ainsel's foot, and when he roars with pain, and the old fairy-mother
+appears instantly, crying angrily: "Who has hurt thee? Who has hurt
+thee?" the elf blurts, of course, "My Ainsel!" and she kicks him
+unceremoniously up chimney, and bids him stop whimpering, since the burn
+was of his own silly doing! Alan, meanwhile, climbs upstairs to bed,
+rejoicing to escape the vengeance of the fairy-mother, and chuckling in
+his sleeve at the funny turn things have taken.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FAIRYLAND.
+
+    "And never would I tire, Janet,
+    In Fairyland to dwell."
+
+
+SO runs the song. Who would weary of so sweet a place? At least, we
+think of it as a sweet place; but like this own world of ours, it was
+whatever a man's eyes made it: good and gracious to the good, troublous
+to the evil. According to an old belief, a mean or angry, or untruthful
+person, always exposed himself, by the very violence of his wrong-doing,
+to become an inmate of Fairyland; and for such a one, it could not have
+been all sunshine. A foot set upon the fairy-ring was enough to cause a
+mortal to be whisked off, pounded, pinched, bewildered, and left far
+from home. It was a strange experience, and it is recorded that it
+befell many a lad and maid to be loosed from earth, and cloistered for
+uncounted years, to return, like our Catskill hero, Rip Van Winkle,
+after what he supposes to be a little time, and to find that generations
+had passed away. For those absent took no thought of time's passing, and
+on reaching earth again, would begin where their lips had dropped a
+sentence half-spoken, a hundred years before. Tales of such truants are
+common the world over.
+
+Gitto Bach (little Griffith) was a Welsh farmer's boy, who looked after
+sheep on the mountain-top. When he came home at evenfall he often showed
+his brothers and sisters bits of paper stamped like money. Now when it
+was given to him, it was real money; but the fairy-gifts would not bear
+handling, and turned useless and limp as soon as Gitto showed them. One
+day he did not return. After two years his mother found him one morning
+at the door, smiling, and with a bundle under his arm. She asked him,
+with many tears, where he had been so long, while they had mourned for
+him as dead. "It is only yesterday I went away!" said Gitto. "See the
+pretty clothes the mountain-children gave me, for dancing with them to
+the music of their harps." And he opened his bundle, and showed a
+beautiful dress: but his mother saw it was only paper, after all, like
+the fairy money.
+
+[Illustration: GITTO BACH AND THE FAIRIES.]
+
+[Illustration: KAGUYAHIME, THE MOON-MAID.]
+
+Our pretty friends enjoyed beguiling mortals into their shining
+underworld, with song, and caresses, and winning promises. Once the
+mortal entered, he met with warm welcomes from all, and the most
+exquisite meat and drink were set before him. Now, if he had but the
+courage to refuse it, he soon found himself back on earth, whence he was
+stolen. But if he yielded to temptation, and his tongue tasted fairy
+food, he could never behold his native hills again for years and years.
+And when, after that exquisite imprisonment, he should be torn from his
+delights and set back at his father's door, he should find his memory
+almost forgotten, and others sitting with a claim in his empty seat. And
+he should not remember how long he had been missing, but grow silent and
+depressed, and sit for hours, with dreamy eyes, on lonely slopes and
+wildwood bridges, not desiring fellowship of any soul alive; but with a
+heartache always for his little lost playfellows, and for that bright
+country far away, until he died.
+
+Often the creature who has once stood in the courts of Fairyland, is
+placed under vow, when released, and allowed to visit the earth, to come
+back at call, and abide there always. For the spell of that place is so
+strong, no heart can escape it, nor wish to escape it. Thus ends the old
+romance of Thomas the Rhymer: that, at the end of seven years, he was
+freed from Fairyland, made wise beyond all men; but he was sworn to
+return whenever the summons should reach him. And once as he was making
+merry with his chosen comrades, a hart and a hind moved slowly along the
+village street; and he knew the sign, laid down his glass, and smiled
+farewell; and followed them straightway into the strange wood, never to
+be seen more by mortal eyes.
+
+A wonderful and beautiful Japanese story, too, the ancient Taketori
+Monogatari, written in the first half of the tenth century, tells us how
+a grey-haired bamboo-gatherer found in a bamboo-blade a radiant
+elf-baby, and kindly took it home to his wife; and because of their
+great and ready generosity to the waif, the gods made them thrive in
+purse and health; and how, when the little one had been with them three
+months, Kaguyahime, for that was she, grew suddenly to a tall and fair
+girl, and so remained unchanging, for twenty years, while five gallant
+Japanese lords were doing her strange commands, and running risks the
+world over. Then, though the emperor, also, was her suitor, and though
+she was unspeakably fond of her old foster-parents, and grieved to go
+from them, she, being a moon-maid, went back in her chariot one glorious
+night to her shining home, whence she had been banished for some old
+fault, and whither the love and longing and homage of all the land
+pursued her.
+
+Many sweet wild Welsh and Cornish legends deal with shepherds and yeomen
+who set foot on a fairy mound by chance, or who, in some other fashion,
+were transplanted to the realm of the dancing, feasting elves. But they
+have a pathetic ending, since no wanderer ever strayed back with all his
+old wits sound and sharp. He seemed as one who walked in sleep, and had
+no care or recognition for the faces that once he held dear. And if he
+were roused too rudely from his long reverie, he died of the shock.
+
+[Illustration: THE LITTLE HUNCHBACK.]
+
+A merrier tale, and one which is very wise and pretty as well, is
+current in many literatures. The Irish version runs somewhat in this
+fashion, and the Spanish and Breton versions are extraordinarily like
+it. A little hunchback resting at nightfall in an enchanted
+neighborhood, heard the fairies, from their borderlands near by, singing
+over and over the names of the days of the week. "And Sunday, and
+Monday, and Tuesday!" they chorus: "and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday."
+The boy thinks it rather hard that they do not know enough to finish
+their musical chant with the names of the remaining days; so, when they
+pause a little, very softly, and tunefully, he adds: "And Wednesday"!
+The wee folk are delighted, and make their chant longer by one strophe;
+and they crowd out in their finery from the mound, bearing the stranger
+far down into its depths where there are the glorious open halls of
+Fairyland: kissing and praising their friend, and bringing him the
+daintiest fruit lips ever tasted; and to reward him lastingly, their
+soft little hands lift the cruel hump from his back, and he runs dancing
+home, at a year's end, to acquaint the village with his happy fortune.
+Now another deformed lad, his neighbor, is racked with jealousy at the
+sight of his former friend made straight and fair; and he rushes to the
+fairy-mound, and sits, scowling, waiting to hear them begin the magic
+song. Presently rise the silver voices: "And Sunday, and Monday, and
+Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and
+Wednesday": whereat the audience breaks in rudely, right in the middle
+of a cadence: "And Friday." Then the gentle elves were wrathful, and
+swarmed out upon him, snarling and striking at him in scorn; and before
+he escaped them, they had fastened on his crooked back beside his own,
+the very hump that had belonged to the first comer! In the anecdote, as
+it is given in Picardy, the justice-dealing goblins are described as
+very small and comely, clad in violet-colored velvet, and wearing hats
+laden with peacock plumes. In the Japanese rendering, a wen takes the
+place of the hump.
+
+Fairyland is the home of every goblin, bright or fierce, that ever we
+heard of; the home, too, of the ogres and dragons, and enchanted
+princesses, and demons, and Jack-the-giant-killers of all time. The
+Brownies belonged there, and went thither in their worldly finery, when
+service was over; the gnomes and snarling mine-sprites, the sweet
+dancing elves, the fairies who stole children, or romped under the
+river's current, or plagued honest farmers, or tiptoed it with a torch
+down a lonesome road--every one there had his country and his fireside.
+
+[Illustration: TAKNAKANX KAN.]
+
+In that merry company were many who have escaped us, and who sit in a
+blossomy corner by themselves, the oddest of the odd: like the Japanese
+Tengus, who have little wings and feathers, like birds, until they grew
+up; mouths very seldom opened, and most amazing big noses, with which,
+on earth, they were wont to fence, to whitewash, to write poetry, and to
+ring bells! There, too, were the dark-skinned Indian wonder-babies:
+Weeng, whom Mr. Longfellow celebrates as Nepahwin, the Indian god of
+sleep, with his numerous train of little fairy men armed with clubs; who
+at nightfall sought out mortals, and with innumerable light blows upon
+their foreheads, compelled them to slumber. The great boaster, Iagoo,
+whom Hiawatha knew, once declared that he had seen King Weeng himself,
+resting against a tree, with many waving and music-making wings on his
+back. Indian, likewise, was the spirit named Canotidan, who dwelt in
+many a hollow tree; and the lively fellow, Taknakanx Kan, who sported
+"in the nodding flowers; who flew with the birds, frisked with the
+squirrels, and skipped with the grasshopper; who was merry with the gay
+running brooks, and shouted with the waterfall; who moved with the
+sailing cloud, and came forth with the dawn." He never slept, and never
+had time to sleep, being the god of perpetual motion. Near him, perhaps,
+see-sawed a couple of long-eyed Chinese San Sao, or the glossy-haired
+Fees of Southern France pelted one another with dew-drops. There also,
+the African Yumboes had their magnificent tents spread: those strange
+little thieving Banshee-Brownies, wrapped in white cotton pangs, who
+leaned back in their seats after a gorgeous repast, and beheld an army
+of hands appear and carry off the golden dishes! There abided, as the
+venerated elder of the rest, the long-bearded Pygmies whom Homer,
+Aristotle and good Herodotus had not scorned to celebrate, whom Sir John
+Mandeville avowed to be "right fair and gentle, after their quantities,
+both the men and the women.... And he that liveth eight year, men hold
+him right passing old ... and of the men of our stature have they as
+great scorn and wonder as we would have among us of giants!"
+
+Of these and thousands more marvellous is Fairyland full; full of things
+startling and splendid and grewsome and visionary:
+
+                      ----full of noises,
+    Sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.
+
+Any picture of it is tame, any worded description dull and heavy, to you
+who discover it daily at first hand, and who know its faces and voices,
+which fade too quickly from the brain. All fine adventures spring
+thence: all loveliest color, odor and companionship are in that
+stirring, sparkling world. Can you not help us back there for an hour?
+Who knows the path? Who can draw a map, and set up a sign-post? Who can
+bar the gate, when we are safe inside, and keep us forever and ever in
+our forsaken "dear sweet land of Once-upon-a-Time"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE.
+
+
+THERE was once a very childish child who laid her fairy-book on its face
+across her knee, and sat all the morning watching the cups of the
+honeysuckle, grieved that not one solitary elf was left to swing on its
+sun-touched edges, and laugh back at her, with unforgetful eyes.
+
+We are sorry for her, and sorry with her. The Little People, alas! have
+gone away; would that they might return! No man knows why nor when they
+left us; nor whither they turned their faces. The exodus was made softly
+and slowly, till the whole bright tribe had stolen imperceptibly into
+exile. Mills, steam-engines and prowling disbelievers joined to banish
+them; their poetic and dreamy drama is over, their magic lamp out, and
+their jocund music hushed and forbidden. Or perhaps they of themselves
+went lingeringly and sorrowfully afar, because the world had grown too
+rough for them.
+
+Geoffrey Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, wrote in his sweet,
+tranquil fashion:
+
+      In olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour . . .
+    Al was this lond fulfilled of faerie . . . . .
+    I speke of mony hundrid yeer ago;
+    But now can no man see non elves mo:
+
+which you may understand as an announcement somewhat ahead of time. For
+many, many "elves mo" were on record after the good poet's lyre was
+hushed, and "thick as motes in the sunbeam" centuries after their
+reported flight. There have been sound-headed folk in every age, of whom
+Chaucer was one, who jested over the poor fairies and their arts, and
+spoke of them only for gentle satire's sake. But though Chaucer was sure
+the goblins had perished, his neighbors saw manifold lively specimens of
+the race, without stirring out of the parish. Up to two hundred years
+ago prayers were said in the churches against bad fairies!
+
+[Illustration: "AL WAS THIS LOND FULFILLED OF FAERIE."]
+
+Sir Walter Scott related that the last Brownie was the Brownie of
+Bodsbeck, who lived there long, and vanished, as is the wont of his
+clan, when the mistress of the house laid milk and a piece of money in
+his haunts. He was loath to go, and moaned all night: "Farewell to
+Bonnie Bodsbeck!" till his departure at break of day. A girl from
+Norfolk, England, questioned by Mr. Thomas Keightley, admitted that she
+had often seen the _Frairies_, dressed in white, coming up from their
+little cities underground! Mr. John Brand saw a man who said he had seen
+one that had seen fairies! And Mr. Robert Hunt, author of the _Drolls
+and Traditions of Old Cornwall_, wrote that forty years ago every rock
+and field in that country was peopled with them! and that "a gentleman
+well-known in the literary world of London very recently saw in
+Devonshire a troop of fairies! It was a breezy summer afternoon, and
+these beautiful little creatures were floating on circling zephyrs up
+the side of a sunlit hill, fantastically playing,
+
+    'Where oxlips and the nodding violet grow.'
+
+So here are three trustworthy gentlemen, makers of books on this special
+subject, and none of them very long dead, to offset Master Geoffrey
+Chaucer, and to bring the "lond fulfilled of faerie" closer than he
+dreamed. About the year 1865, a correspondent told Mr. Hunt the
+following queer little story:
+
+[Illustration: FAIRY STORIES.]
+
+"I heard last week of three fairies having been seen in Zennor very
+recently. A man who lived at the foot of Trendreen Hill in the valley of
+Treridge, I think, was cutting furze on the hill. Near the middle of
+the day he saw one of the small people, not more than a foot long,
+stretched at full length and fast asleep, on a bank of heath, surrounded
+by high brakes of furze. The man took off his furze-cuff and slipped the
+little man into it without his waking up, went down to the house, and
+took the little fellow out of the cuff on the hearthstone, when he
+awoke, and seemed quite pleased and at home, beginning to play with the
+children, who were well pleased also with the small body, and called him
+Bobby Griglans. The old people were very careful not to let Bob out of
+the house, nor be seen by the neighbors, as he had promised to show the
+man where crocks of gold were buried on the hill. A few days after he
+was brought, all the neighbors came with their horses, according to
+custom, to bring home the winter's reek of furze, which had to be
+brought down the hill in trusses on the backs of the horses. That Bob
+might be safe and out of sight, he and the children were shut up in the
+barn. Whilst the furze-carriers were in to dinner, the prisoners
+contrived to get out to have a run round the furze-reek, when they saw a
+little man and woman not much larger than Bob, searching into every hole
+and corner among the trusses that were dropped round the unfinished
+reek. The little woman was wringing her hands and crying 'O my dear and
+tender Skillywidden! wherever canst thou be gone to? Shall I ever cast
+eyes on thee again?' 'Go 'e back!' says Bob to the children; 'my father
+and mother are come here too.' He then cried out: 'Here I am, mammy!' By
+the time the words were out of his mouth, the little man and woman, with
+their precious Skillywidden, were nowhere to be seen, and there has
+been no sight nor sign of them since. The children got a sound thrashing
+for letting Skillywidden escape."
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF SKILLYWIDDEN.]
+
+Such is the latest evidence we can find of the whereabouts of our
+goblins.
+
+We may, however, consider ourselves their contemporaries, since among
+the peasantry of many countries over-seas, the belief is not yet
+extinct. But it is pretty clear to us, modern and American as we are
+(safer in so thinking than anybody was anywhere before!) that the
+"restless people," as the Scotch called them, are at rest, and clean
+quit of this world; and perhaps satisfied, at last, of their chance of
+salvation, along with fortunate Christians.
+
+Such a great system as this of fairy-lore, propped on such show of
+earnestness, grew up, not of a sudden like a mushroom after a July
+rain, but gradually and securely, like a coral-reef. And the
+dream-building was not nonsense at all, but a way of putting what was
+evident and marvellous into a familiar guise. If certain strange things,
+which are called phenomena, happened--things like the coming of pebbles
+from clouds, music from sand, sparkling light from decay, or disease and
+death from the mere handling of a velvety leaf--then our forefathers,
+instead of gazing straight into the eyes of the fact, as we are taught
+to do, looked askance, and made a fantastic rigmarole concerning the
+pebbles, or the music, and passed it down as religion and law.
+
+The simple-minded citizens of old referred any trifling occurrence,
+pleasant or unpleasant, to the fairies. The demons and deities,
+according to their notion of fitness, governed in vaster matters; and
+the new, potent sprites took shape in the popular brain as the
+controllers of petty affairs. If a shepherd found one of his flock sick,
+it had been elf-shot; if a girl's wits went wool-gathering, it was a
+sign she had been in fairyland; if a cooing baby turned peevish and
+thin, it was a changeling! Wherever you now see a mist, a cobweb, a
+moving shadow on the grass; wherever you hear a cricket-chirp, or the
+plash of a waterfall, or the cry of the bird on the wing, there of yore
+were the fairy-folk in their beauty. They stood in the mind to represent
+the lesser secrets of Nature, to account for some wonder heard and seen.
+It was many a century before nations stopped romancing about the brave
+things on land and sea, and began to speculate, to observe more keenly,
+to hunt out reasons, and to lift the haze of their own fancy from heroic
+facts and deeds.
+
+Think a moment of the Danish moon-man, who breathed pestilence, and the
+moon-woman, whose harp was so charming. Well, the moon-man meant nothing
+else than the marsh, slimy and dangerous, which yielded a malarial odor;
+and the wee woman with her harp represented the musical night-wind,
+which played over the marsh rushes and reeds. Was it not so, too, with
+the larger myths of Greece? For the story of Proserpine, carried away by
+the god of the under world, and after a weary while, given back for
+half-a-year to her fond mother Ceres, tells really of the seed-corn
+which is cast into her dark soil, and long hidden; but reappears in
+glory, and stays overground for months, basking in the sun. And so on
+with many a fable, which we read, unguessing of the thought and purpose
+beneath. Though it was erring, we can hardly thank too much that joyous
+and reverent old paganism which fancied it saw divinity in each move of
+Nature, kept a natural piety towards everything that lived, and made a
+thousand sweet memoranda, to remind us forever of the wonder and charm
+of our earth. All mythology, and the part the fairies play in it, stands
+for what is true.
+
+                    ----"Still
+    Doth the old instinct bring back the old names":
+
+and again and again, when we cite some beautiful fiction of Merman and
+Kobold, of White Dwarf or Pooka, we but repeat, whether aware of it or
+not, how the dews come down at morning, or the storm-wind breaks the
+strong trees, or how a comet, trailing light, bursts headlong across the
+wide sky.
+
+To comprehend fairy-stories, to get under the surface of them, we would
+have to go over them all at great length, and with exhaustless patience.
+And as in digging for the tendrils of a delicate, berry-laden vine, we
+have to search, sometimes, deep and wide into the woodland loam, among
+gnarly roots of shrubs and giant pines, so in tracing the sources of the
+simplest tale which makes us glad or sad, we fall across a network of
+ponderous ancient lore; of custom, prejudice, and lost day-dreams, from
+which this vine, also, is hard to be severed.
+
+The spirit of these neat little goblin-chronicles was right and sincere;
+but the matter of them was often sadly astray. Of course, sometimes,
+useless, misleading details gathered to obscure the first idea, and to
+overrun it with a tangle of error; and not only were fine stories
+spoiled, but many were started which were funny, or silly, or grim
+merely, without serving any use beyond that.
+
+But so powerful is Truth, when there was actually a grain of it at the
+centre, that even those versions which were exaggerated and distorted,
+played into the hands of what we call Folk-lore, and laid their golden
+key at the feet of Science. You will discover that, besides pointing out
+the workings of the natural world, the fairy-tales rested often on the
+workings of our own minds and consciences. The Brownie was a little
+schoolmaster set up to teach love of order, and the need of perfect
+courtesy; the Nix betokened anything sweet and beguiling, which yet was
+hurtful, and to which it was, and is, a gallant heart's duty not to
+yield. And thus, from beginning to end, the elves at whom we laugh, help
+us toward larger knowledge, and a more chivalrous code of behavior. How
+shall we say, then, that there never was a fairy?
+
+[Illustration: GOOD-BYE]
+
+A miner, hearing the drip of subterranean water, took it to be a Duergar
+or a Bucca, swinging his tiny hammer over the shining ore. His notion of
+the Bucca, askew as it was, was one at bottom with our knowledge of the
+dark brooklet. You, the young heirs of mighty Science, can often
+outstrip the slow-gathered wisdom of dead philosophers. But do not
+despise that fine old imagination, which felt its way almost to the
+light. A sixteenth-century boy, who was all excitement once over the
+pranks of Robin Goodfellow, knew many precious things which our very
+great nineteenth-century acuteness has made us lose!
+
+Good-bye, then, to the army of vanishing "gentry," and to their
+steadfast friends, and to you, children dear! who are the guardians of
+their wild unwritten records. Shall you not miss them when next the moon
+is high on the blossomy hillocks, and the thistledown, ready-saddled,
+plunges to be off and away? Merry fellows they were, and shrewd and
+just; and we were very fond of them; and now they are gone. And their
+going, like a mounting harmony, note by note, which ends in one noble
+chord, with a hush after it, leads us to a serious parting word. Keep
+the fairies in kindly memory; do not lose your interest in them. They
+and their history have an enchanting value, which need never be outgrown
+nor set aside; and to the gravest mind they bring much which is
+beautiful, humane and suggestive.
+
+We have found that believers in the Little People were not so wrong,
+after all; and that the eye claiming to have seen a fairy saw, verily, a
+sight quite as astonishing. Let us think as gently of other myths to
+which men have given zeal, awe and admiration, of every faith hereafter
+which seems to us odd and mistaken. For many things which are not true
+in the exact sense, are yet dear to Truth; and follow her as a baby's
+tripping tongue lisps the language of its mother, not very successfully,
+but still with loyalty, and with a meaning which attentive ears can
+always catch.
+
+Surely, our ancestors loved the "span-long elves" who wrought them no
+great harm, and who gave them help and cheer. We will praise them, too.
+Who knows but some little goblin's thorny finger directed many an
+innocent human heart to march, albeit waveringly, towards the ample
+light of God?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page vii, "Puck" changed to "Pueck" (All that Pueck demanded)
+
+Page vii, "wa" changed to "Wa" (Wag-at-the-Wa')
+
+Page viii, "Kopenick" changed to "Koepenick" (Kobold of Koepenick)
+
+Page viii, "changling" changed to "changeling" (was an Irish changeling)
+
+Page viii, "Taknakaux" changed to "Taknakanx" (Taknakanx Kan)
+
+Page 27, "airy" changed to "fairy" (to the fairy neighbors)
+
+Page 30, illustration caption, "RUGEN" changed to "RUeGEN" (THE ISLE OF
+RUeGEN)
+
+Page 37, illustration caption, "RUGEN" changed to "RUeGEN" (DWARVES OF
+RUeGEN)
+
+Page 38, repeated word "and" removed from text. Original read (by twos
+and and threes)
+
+Page 93, illustration caption, "KOPENICK" changed to "KOePENICK" (KOBOLD
+OF KOePENICK)
+
+Page 169, "scources" changed to "sources" (the sources of the simplest)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Brownies and Bogles, by Louise Imogen Guiney
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