Brownies and Bogles

by Louise Imogen Guiney

"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."

FAIRY STORIES.

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.