“Mither,” he whispered in his dreams, “my shoon are worn, and my feet bleed; but I’ll soon creep hame, if I can. Keep the parritch warm for me.”
Robin was as strong as a mountain-goat; and his strength was put to the task of threshing rye, grinding oats and corn, or drawing water from a brook.
Every night, troops of gay fairies and plodding brownies stole off on a visit to the upper world, leaving Robin and his companions in ever-deeper despair. Poor Robin! he was fain to sing—
“Oh, that my father had ne’er on me smiled!
Oh, that my mother had ne’er to me sung!
Oh, that my cradle had never been rocked,
But that I had died when I was young.”
Now, there was one good-natured brownie who pitied Robin. When he took a journey to earth with his fellow-brownies, he often threshed rye for the laddie’s father, or churned butter in his good mother’s dairy, unseen and unsuspected. If the little creature had been watched, and paid for these good offices, he would have left the farmhouse forever in sore displeasure.
To homesick Robin he brought news of the family who mourned him as dead. He stole a silky tress of Janet’s fair hair, and wondered to see the boy weep over it; for brotherly affection is a sentiment which never yet penetrated the heart of a brownie. The dull little sprite would gladly have helped the poor lad to his freedom, but told him that only on one night of the year was there the least hope, and that was on Hallow-e’en, when the whole nation of fairies ride in procession through the streets of earth.
So Robin was instructed to spin a dream, which the kind brownie would hum in Janet’s ear while she slept. By this means the lassie would not only learn that her brother was in the power of the elves, but would also learn how to release him.
Accordingly, the night before Hallow-e’en, the bonnie Janet dreamed that the long-lost Robin was living in Elf-land, and that he was to pass through the streets with a cavalcade of fairies. But, alas! how should even a sister know him in the dim starlight, among the passing troops of elfish and mortal riders? The dream assured her that she might let the first company go by, and the second; but Robin would be one of the third.
The full directions as to how she should act were given in poetical form, as follows:
“First let pass the black, Janet,
And syne let pass the brown;
But grip ye to the milk-white steed,
And pull the rider down.