This explanation was offered of how fairies may exist and yet be invisible:—‘Our Saviour became invisible though in the body; and, as the Scriptures suggest, I suppose we are obliged to concede a similar power of invisibility to spirits as well, good and evil ones alike.’
Precautions against Fairies.—‘I remember how an old woman pulled me out of a fairy ring to save me from being taken.
‘If a mother takes some bindweed and places it burnt at the ends over her babe’s cradle, the fairies have no power over the child. The bindweed is a common roadside convolvulus.
‘As a boy, I saw two old women passing a babe over red-hot coals, and then drop some of the cinders in a cup of water and give the water to the babe to drink, in order to cure it of a fairy stroke.’
Fairy Fights on Halloween.—‘It is a common belief now that on Halloween the fairies, or the fairy hosts, have fights. Lichens on rocks after there has been a frost get yellowish-red, and then when they thaw and the moisture spreads out from them the rocks are a bright red; and this bright red is said to be the blood of the fairies after one of their battles.’
Fairies and the Hump-back.—The following story by the present witness is curious, for it is the same story of a hump-back which is so widespread. The fact that in Scotland the hump is removed or added by fairies as it is in Ireland, in Cornwall by pixies, and in Brittany by corrigans, goes far to prove the essential identity of these three orders of beings. The story comes from one of the remote Western Hebrides, Benbecula:—‘A man who was a hump-back once met the fairies dancing, and danced with their queen; and he sang with them, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” so well that they took off his hump, and he returned home a straight-bodied man. Then a tailor went past the same place, and was also admitted by the fairies to their dance. He caught the fairy queen by the waist, and she resented his familiarity. And in singing he added “Thursday” to their song and spoilt it. To pay the tailor for his rudeness and ill manners, the dancers took up the hump they had just removed from the first man and clapped it on his back, and the conceited fellow went home a hump-back.’
Libations to Fairies.—‘An elder in my church knew a woman who was accustomed, in milking her cows, to offer libations to the fairies.[31] The woman was later converted to Christ and gave up the practice, and as a result one of her cows was taken by the fairies. Then she revived the practice.
‘The fairy queen who watches over cows is called Gruagach in the Islands, and she is often seen. In pouring libations to her and her fairies various kinds of stones, usually with hollows in them, are used.[32]
‘In Lewis libations are poured to the goddess [or god] of the sea, called Shoney,[33] in order to bring in seaweed. Until modern times in Iona similar libations were poured to a god corresponding to Neptune.’
In the Highlands