FAIRY RINGS. Ill 



verdure spring up, and so sacred are these circles of green, that 

 the simple sheep abstain firoin them, and tread but softly where they 

 grow. Shakspere makes beautiful use of this article of ancient faith, 

 in that passage in the Tempest^ where Prospero invokes for the last 

 time the supernatural powers to his aid : — 



Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves; 

 And ye that on the sands with printless foot 

 Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 

 When he comes back ; you demi-puppets, that 

 By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make, 

 Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you, whose pastime 

 'Tis to make midnight mushrooms. 



Drayton, speaking of the fairies, says — 



They in their courses make that round 

 In meadows and in marshes found, 

 Of them so called the fairy ground. 



According to Olaus Magnus, this cause of the circles in the grass^ 

 called " Fairy Rings," was a general belief with the northern 

 nations ; and most of our poets who adopt it, follow those traditiona 

 which the Norsemen left amongst us. 



Some very curious legends attach themselves to these fairy rings, as 

 indeed they do to every other branch of fairy lore. In Scott's Min- 

 strelsy of the Scottish Border, a strange story is related of a poor man, 

 who being employed in pulling heather upon Peatlaw, near Carter- 

 haugh, had tired of his labour, and had lain himself down to sleep 

 upon a fairy ring. When he awoke, he was amazed to find himself 

 in the midst of a populous city, to which, as well as to the means of 

 transportation, he was a stranger. His coat was left upon the Peat- 

 law, and his bonnet, which had fallen off in the course of his aerial 

 journey, was afterwards found hanging on the steeple of the church 

 at Lanark. The distress of the luckless adventurer was somewhat 

 relieved by meeting a carrier whom he had formerly known, who 

 carried him back to Glasgow by a slower conveyance than had taken 

 him from thence. At Carterhaugh, at the confluence of the Ettrick 

 and Yarrow, the peasants point out these rings as unmistakable evi- 

 dences of fairy revels ; and throughout Scotland, and more particularly 

 in Selkirkshire, the belief in fairies and fairy influence is still perti- 

 naciously held by the peasants. Moses Pitt, in a scarce tract, relates 

 that his female servant — " Ann Jeffries * * * was one day 



