[ 650 ] [JUNE, 



UNREPORTED CASF.S. NO. I. 



The Human Cuckoo. 



ABOUT a year after Hosea Parfett, once a flourishing farmer, and the 

 last of a renowned race of wrestlers and cudgel-players, had, on account 

 of his confirmed lameness, produced by a terrific in-lock from a Wilt- 

 shire giant, who had dared the whole village to a bout, in which Hosea, 

 at the expense of a dislocated hip, threw him three complete pancakes but 

 more especially in consideration of his recent ruin by mildew, fly, murrain, 

 and other disasters, been elected parish mole-catcher, Rachael, his seventh 

 child, was born. Her eyes, when she first opened them to weep, were, as 

 Brodie Bagster, the village song-maker, says, like little violets, filled with 

 dew, peeping out of a spring snow. The same worthy, in a doggrel com- 

 position, which fits indifferently to the tune of Ally Croker, recording the 

 story of her early life, observes that her hair was " silky soft and silvery 

 bright" as the down of a nestling dove j her first tooth, a pearl plucked 

 by a mermaid from some coral nook, in which its maker, the hermit- 

 oyster so he called the fish had hid it -, and her cheek a mark which the 

 fairies had set up to pelt all day with rose-buds. Brodie said half a 

 hundred other flowery things of Rachael, which it would have broken his 

 heart to know had been better said, before he was born, of half a thou- 

 sand others. Notwithstanding the hyperbolic compliments of her rustic 

 laureate, which, unsupported, would perhaps have rendered the fact doubt- 

 ful, Rachael, from the testimony of all who saw her in the early part of her 

 babyhood, appears to have been eminently beautiful. She was, it is said, 

 a living similitude of some fine old picture of a wingless angel, in the an- 

 tique library at Scroby Hall, which her mother had had frequent occasion 

 to visit, while pregnant, for the purpose of receiving from Sir Ralph, who 

 was churchwarden, the pittance per dozen allowed by the parish for the 

 moles caught by Hosea, whose pride would not permit him to appear 

 in person as a claimant of the parochial fees to which his industry, ab- 

 surdly misdirected as it was, by custom and promise entitled him. 



Rachael was scarcely able to run alone when some mysterious malady 

 wrought an appalling change in her appearance, and she became again a 

 nursling hideous from her extreme haggardness. It was said, and 

 steadfastly believed in the village, that Hosea Parfett's child had been stolen 

 by the fairies, and that the creature which nestled in its place was an ac- 

 cursed changeling. Rachael's mother began to loathe the baby on which 

 she had before most passionately doted; and after pining for a few 

 weeks, as Brodie Bagster sings, turned from the sun like a drooping 

 flower, and died. Shortly after this event, the good women of tha village, 

 at a council held, one winter's eve, round the blacksmith's forge, re- 

 solved on compelling the fairies to return Rachael, and relieve Hosea Par- 

 fett of the changeling. The little creature was accordingly placed on a 

 shovel, and exposed, the same night, at the back door of Hosea's house, 

 to the cold gleam of the setting moon. The attendant ceremonies were 

 conducted with such powerful precision, that, if Brodie may be believed, 

 the fairies thought proper to refund ; and, three months after, a young 

 farmer's wife, who, having lost her first-born, had volunteered to become 

 wet-nurse to the recent visitor in fairy-land, brought young Rachael back 

 to the mole-catcher's cottage, even more beautiful than when she was born. 



