Brownies and Bogles Part 6

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: t.i.tania 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.s 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 fl.u.s.ter 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Stromkarl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THERE WAS AN IRISH CHANGELING.]

The Welsh fairies had good taste, and admired wholesome and handsome children. They stole such often, and left for subst.i.tute 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE ACORN BEFORE THE OAK HAVE I SEEN."]

If the bereaved parent did some very astonis.h.i.+ng 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-sh.e.l.l. 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-sh.e.l.l?

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 Kruzimugeli, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 sc.r.a.pe. The anecdote of "Who hurt you? Myself!" was told in Spain, Finland, Brittainy, j.a.pan, 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 n.o.body? 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: "n.o.body!" Consider what follows a typical modern version of the same trick.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 pa.s.sed away. For those absent took no thought of time's pa.s.sing, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GITTO BACH AND THE FAIRIES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: KAGUYAHIME, THE MOON-MAID.]

Our pretty friends enjoyed beguiling mortals into their s.h.i.+ning 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s, and smiled farewell; and followed them straightway into the strange wood, never to be seen more by mortal eyes.

A wonderful and beautiful j.a.panese 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 G.o.ds 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 j.a.panese 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 peac.o.c.k plumes. In the j.a.panese rendering, a wen takes the place of the hump.