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 Ægeus 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?