And each feature flat like the bark we see,
When a bough has been lopped from the bole of a tree,
When the newer bark has crept healingly round
And laps o’er the edge of the open wound;
Her knotty, root-like feet are bare,
And her height is an ell from heel to hair.
Sometimes, however, the moss-women and their relatives the wood-maidens are more friendly to man, and will help him industriously in the harvest-field; they have even been known to enter his service and bring prosperity to all his undertakings.
The wild women of Tyrol, known locally as Wild-fanggen, are much more terrifying individuals. Gigantic in stature, their whole body is covered with hair and bristles, and their face distorted with a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. They live together in the woods, with which their lives are bound up. If their special wood is destroyed they disappear; if the tree from which a fangga takes her name dies or is felled, she passes out of existence.[145]
The peasants in the Swiss Canton of the Grisons, which by the way has a “wild-man” for its heraldic device, believe in wood-spirits of great strength and agility, who are skilled in weather-lore and the recovery of strayed cattle.[146] The female spirits, some of whom have been known to marry mortals, are clothed in skins; but the males, who are hairy, content themselves with a crown of oak leaves. They are sometimes helpful to men, but more often mischievous, having a propensity for stealing the milk and carrying off the children of the peasants.
The white and green ladies of Franche Comté and Neufchatel belong to the same family, their special proclivity being to entice men away, to drag them through brake and brier, and leave them stripped of their possessions.[147] In Neufchatel there is a rock, “La roche de la Dame Verte,” which young men are especially warned to avoid; and in the Jura, a wood where beneath an oak the green ladies are wont to light a fire, and may be heard singing and dancing around it. The peasants when they see the wild flowers and the young corn waving in the wind, whisper to each other that the green lady is passing over them with her companions.