“Two days!” echoed the mother. “You have been away ten years! Look how you have grown!”
After she had overcome her surprise the girl resumed her household duties as if nothing particular had happened, and knitted a pair of stockings for her godchild. When they were finished she carried them to the fairy grotto, where, as she thought, she spent the afternoon. But in reality she had been away from home this time for five years. As she was leaving, her godchild gave her a purse, saying: “This purse is full of gold. Whenever you take a piece out another one will come in its place, but if any one else uses it it will lose all its virtue.”
When the girl returned to the village at last it was to find her mother dead, her brothers gone abroad, and her sisters married, so that she was the only one left at home. As she was pretty and a good housewife she did not want for lovers, and in due time she chose one for a husband. She did not tell her spouse about the purse she had had from the fairies, and if she wanted to give him a piece of gold she withdrew it from the magic purse in secret. She never went back to the fairy cavern, as she had no mind to return from it and find her husband an old man.
The Fisherman and the Fairies
A fisherman of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, walking home to his cottage from his boat one evening along the wet sands, came, unawares, upon a number of fairies in a houle. They were talking and laughing gaily, and the fisherman observed that while they made merry they 81 rubbed their bodies with a kind of ointment or pomade. All at once, to the old salt’s surprise, they turned into ordinary women. Concealing himself behind a rock, the fisherman watched them until the now completely transformed immortals quitted their haunt and waddled away in the guise of old market-women.
FAIRIES IN A BRETON ‘HOULE’
The fisherman waited until they were well out of sight, and then entered the cavern, where the first object that met his gaze was the pot of ointment which had effected the marvellous change he had witnessed. Taking some of the pomade on his forefinger, he smeared it around his left eye. He afterward found that he could penetrate the various disguises assumed by the fairies wherever he met them, and that these were for the most part adopted for the purposes of trickery. Thus he was able to see a fairy in the assumed shape of a beggar-woman going from door to door demanding alms, seeking an opportunity to steal or work mischief, and all the while casting spells upon those who were charitable enough to assist her. Again, he could distinguish real fish caught in his net at sea from merwomen disguised as fish, who were desirous of entangling the nets or otherwise distressing and annoying the fishermen.
But nowhere was the disguised fairy race so much in evidence as at the fair of Ploubalay, where he recognized several of the elusive folk in the semblance of raree-showmen, fortune-tellers, and the like, who had taken these shapes in order to deceive. He was quietly smiling at their pranks, when some of the fairies who composed a troupe of performers in front of one of the booths regarded him very earnestly. He felt certain that they had penetrated his secret, but ere he could make off one of them threw a stick at him with such 82 violence that it struck and burst the offending left eye.