Mr. Wentz gets no evidence of fairy-wives from Ireland, but a great number out of Wales. One of them is the beautiful tale of Einion and Olwen (p. 161) which has many points of resemblance with mine from the Border. Einion also seems to have met the King of the Wood. Like Andrew King he was kissed by the nymphs, but only by one of them; but unlike him he stayed in their country for a year and a day, then went back to his own people, and finally returned for his fairy-wife. Taliesin was their son. No conditions seem to have been made.
So much for fairy brides, but now for fairy grooms. I have two cases to add to that of Quidnunc, but before giving them, let me say of his affair that since the suggestion there seems to have come from him to the woman, the incarnation, if such there were, must have been voluntary. Evocation was not instrumental in it. He appeared before her, as she had appeared before others, many others, including myself, and his subsequent commerce with her was achieved by his own personal force. You may say that she had been prepared to see him by belief and desire, by belief and desire acting upon a mind greatly distressed and probably overwrought. You may say that she saw what she ardently desired to see. It is quite true, I cannot deny it; but I point to his previous manifestations, and leave it there.
Here is a tale to the purpose which I got out of Worcestershire. Two girls, daughter and niece of a farmer, bosom friends and bed-fellows, became involved in a love-affair and, desperate of a happy issue, attempted a charm to win their lovers back. On All Hallow Eve, two hours before the sun, they went into the garden, barefoot, in their nightgowns and circled about a stone which was believed to be bewitched.[13] They used certain words, the Lord's prayer backward or what not, and had an apparition. A brown man came out of the bushes and looked at them for some time. Then he came to them, paralysed as they may have been, and peering closely into the face of one of them gave her a flower and disappeared. That same evening they kept the Hallow E'en with the usual play, half-earnest, half-game, and, among other things which they did, "peascodded" the girls. The game is a very old one, and consists in setting the victim in a chair with her back to the door while her companions rub her down with handfuls of pea-shucks. During this ceremony if any man enter the room he is her lover, and she is handed over to him. This was done, then, to one of the girls who had dared the dawn magic; and in the midst of it a brown man, dressed in a smock-frock tied up with green ribbons, appeared, standing in the door. He took the girl by the hand and led her out of the house. She was seen no more that night, nor for many days afterward, though her parents and neighbours hunted her far and wide. By-and-by she was reported at a village some ten or twelve miles off on the Shropshire border, where some shepherds had found her wandering the hill. She was brought home but could give no good account of herself, or would not. She said that she had followed her lover, married him, and lost him. Nothing would comfort her, nothing could keep her in the house. She was locked in, but made her way out; she was presently sent to the lunatic asylum, but escaped from that. Then she got away for good and all and never came back again. No trace of her body could be found. What are you to make of a thing of the sort? I give it for what it is worth, with this note only, that the apparition was manifest to several persons, though not, I fancy, to any but the girls concerned in the peascodding.
[13] It is said to have been the base of a Roman terminal statue, but I have not seen it.
The Willow-lad's is another tale of the same kind. It was described in 1787 by the Reverend Samuel Jordan in the Gentleman's Magazine, if I am not mistaken.
The Willow-lad was an apparition which was believed to appear in a withy-bed on the banks of the Ouse near Huntingdon. He could only be seen at dusk, and only by women. He had a sinister reputation, and to say of a girl that she had been to the withy-bed was a broad hint that she was no better than she should be. Yet, according to Mr. Jordan, the girls did go there in numbers, and to such effect that by an order of the Town Council the place was stubbed up. You had to go alone to the withy-bed between sunset and sunrise of a moonless night, to lay your hand upon a certain stump and say, and in a loud voice:—
Willow-boy, Willow-boy, come to me soon,
After the sun and before the moon.
Hide the stars and cover my head;
Let no man see me when I be wed.
One would like to know whether the Willow-lad's powers perished with the withy-bed. They should not, but should have been turned to malicious uses. There are many cases in Mr. Lawson's book of the malefical effect upon the Dryads of cutting down the trees whose spirit they are. And most people know Landor's idyll, or if they don't, they should.
There are queer doings under the sun as well as under the moon. A man may travel far without leaving his arm-chair by the fire, in countries where no tourist-tickets obtain, and see stranger things than are recorded by Herr Baedeker.