"I got my mate an' my wages,
An' they want nae mair o' me."
Although, according to some, the Grogachs gladly accept food, others say that they and the Pechts are offended if it is offered to them, and leave to return no more.
I have not often heard of clothes being offered to the Pechts or Grogachs, but the Rev. John G. Campbell relates a story of a Brownie in Shetland who ground grain in a hand-quern at night. He was rewarded for his labours by a cloak and hood left for him at the mill. These disappeared in the morning, and with them the Brownie, who never came back.[51]
A similar tale is told of a Swiss dwarf. At Ems, in Canton Valais, a miller engaged the services of a "Gottwerg," and the little man worked early and late, sometimes rising in the night to see that all was in order. The mill produced twice as much as formerly, and at the end of the year the dwarf was rewarded by a garment made of the best wool. He put it on, jumped for joy, and crying out, "Now I am a handsome man, I have no more need to grind rye," he disappeared, and was not seen again.[52]
In these tales from Ireland, Scotland, and Switzerland, may there not be a reminiscence of a conquered race of small stature, but considerable strength, who worked either as slaves or for some small gift? No doubt they were badly fed, and their clothing would be of the scantiest.
Like the Danes and the Pechts, the fairies live underground. There is a widespread story of a fairy woman who begs a cottager not to throw water out at the doorstep, as it falls down her chimney. The request is invariably granted.
Some of these "wee folk" dwell in palaces under the sea. I heard a story at Ballyliffan, in Co. Donegal, of men being out in a boat which was nearly capsized by a heavy sea raised by a fairy. At last one sailor cried out to throw a nail against the advancing wave; this was done, and the nail hit the fairy. That night a woman, skilled in healing, received a message calling upon her to go to the courts below the sea. She consented, extracted the nail, and cured the fairy woman, but was careful not to eat any food offered to her. This fairy is said to have promised a man a pot of gold if he would marry her, but he refused.
An old man at Culdaff told me another tale of the sea. A fishing-boat was nearly overwhelmed, when a fairy-boat was seen riding on the top of a great wave, and a voice from it cried: "Do not harm that boat; an old friend of mine is in it." The voice belonged to a man who was supposed to be dead; but he had been carried off by the fairies, and would not allow them to injure his old friend.
If the Irish fairy has power over the waves, the Swiss dwarf can divert the course of the devastating landslip. I was told by an elderly man in the Bernese Oberland of the destruction of Burglauenen, a village near Grindelwald. All the cottages were overwhelmed by a landslip except one poor hut, which had given shelter to a dwarf, who was seen, seated on a stone, directing the moving mass away from the abode of his friends. A similar story is told of the destruction of Niederdorf, in the Simmenthal.[53] One Sunday evening a feeble little man clad in rags came to the village; he knocked at several houses, praying the inmates to give him, for the love of God, a night's shelter. Everywhere he was refused—one hard-hearted woman telling him to go and break stones—until he came to a poor basket-maker and his wife, who gave him the best they had, and when he left he promised that God would reward them. A week later the village was destroyed by a terrible landslip, but here also the dwarf saved the dwelling of those who had befriended him.