The Changeling.
In times long past a young couple occupied a cottage in the neighbourhood of L’Erée. They were in the second year of their marriage, and little more than a fortnight had elapsed since the wife had presented her husband with his first-born son. The happy father, who, like most of the inhabitants of the coast, filled up the time in which he was not otherwise occupied, in collecting sea-weed or fishing, returned one morning from the beach with a basketful of limpets. There are various ways of cooking this shell-fish, which, from the earliest times, appears to have formed a considerable article of food among the poorer inhabitants of the sea-shore, and one of the ways of dressing them is by placing them on the hot embers, where they are soon baked or fried in their own cup-shaped shells. Cooked in this manner they form an appetizing relish to the “dorâïe,” or slice of bread-and-butter, which forms the ordinary mid-day meal of the labouring man.
A good fire of furze and sea-weed was flaming on the hearth when the man entered his cottage, and, having raked the hot embers together, he proceeded to arrange the limpets on the ashes, and then left them to cook while he went out to finish digging a piece of ground. The wife in the meanwhile was occupied in some domestic work, but casting a look from time to time on her new-born babe, which was sleeping quietly in its cradle. Suddenly she was startled by hearing an unknown voice, which seemed to proceed from the child. She turned quickly round, and was much surprised to see the infant sitting up, and looking with the greatest interest at the fire-place, and to hear it exclaim in tones of astonishment:—
“Je n’sis de chut an, ni d’antan,
Ni du temps du Rouey Jehan,
Mais de tous mes jours, et de tous mes ans,
Je n’ai vu autant de pots bouaillants.”
(“I’m not of this year, nor the year before,
Nor yet of the time of King John of yore,
But in all my days and years, I ween,