[349] Brand, Popular Antiquities, ii. 513. Bohn's edit.
[350] Given in the Literary Gazette for 1825. No. 430.
[351] Brand, Popular Antiquities, ii. 503. Bohn's edit.
[352] The Elfbore of Scotland, where it is likewise ascribed to the fairies, Jamieson, s. v. The same opinion prevails in Denmark, where it is said that any one who looks through it will see things he would not otherwise have known: see Thiele, ii. 18.
[353] The Anglo-Saxon lǽan, laécan, to play.
[354] We have abridged this legend from a well-written letter in the Literary Gazette, No. 430 (1825), the writer of which says, he knew the house in which it was said to have occurred. He also says he remembered an old tailor, who said the horn was often pitched at the head of himself and his apprentice, when in the North-country fashion they went to work at the farm-house. Its identity with other legends will be at once perceived.
[355] And true no doubt it is, i. e. the impression made on her imagination was as strong as if the objects had been actually before her. The narrator is the same person who told the preceding Boggart story.
[356] Fairy Tales, pp. 24, 56.
[357] In Northumberland the common people call a certain fungous excrescence, sometimes found about the roots of old trees, Fairy-butter. After great rains and in a certain degree of putrefaction, it is reduced to a consistency, which, together with its colour, makes it not unlike butter, and hence the name. Brand, Popular Antiquities, ii. 492, Bohn's edit.
The Menyn Tylna Têg or Fairy-butter of Wales, we are told in the same place, is a substance found at a great depth in cavities of limestone-rocks when sinking for lead-ore.