The Kelpie. 53 



the hapless wanderer who has met his fate in some lonely pool, 

 or the swimmer whose strength has failed him when crossing some 

 deep loch, should be regarded as the victim of the exacting 

 demon having watch and ward over those particular waters ; or 

 that the fiendishness of the latter's nature should be judged by 

 the number of lives claimed by the river or stream where he has 

 his habitation ? 



In one of the stanzas of his "Address to the Deil," Burns 

 both indicates the Kelpie's traditional character and hints at the 

 popular idea in his dav of where the ultimate responsibility for his 

 actions rested : — 



"When thowes dissolve the snawy lioord, 

 An' float the jinglin' icy-boord, 

 Then Water-Kelpies haunt the foord. 



By your direction, 

 An' 'nighted Trav'llers are allur'd 



To their destruction." 



The necessity was generally recognised of keeping in the 

 Kelpie's good graces. On the Scottish mainland an offering was 

 always made beforehand to the guardian spirit of the well whose 

 healing or other properties were being invoked. And in Shetland 

 care used to be taken every year to conciliate the Kelpie by 

 leaving a small basketful of corn on the table on which the hand- 

 mill stood; otherwise the wheel of the water-mill might be 

 suddenly held fast and operations brought abruptly to a stand- 

 still, or in the middle of the night the whole steading might be 

 mysteriously set in commotion. 



"Now, be guid, or da Noggle " (the Kelpie) "will tak' dee 

 awa' " was until within quite recent years the caution with which 

 mothers in the outlying Shetland island cf Foula put their chil- 

 dren to bed. So prevalent and over-powering, indeed, was the 

 dread entertained for the Kelpie, that in the Solway itself it is said 

 to have been directly responsible for a. disaster. " It is not 

 twenty years," savs a note to the lines just quoted from the 

 "Address to the Deil," in an edition apparently published about 

 the middle of last century : — " It is not twenty years since the 

 piercing shrieks and supplications for help of a passage-boat's 

 company, which had been landed on a sand-bank, at low water, 

 in the Solway Firth, instead of on the Cumberland coast, and 



