156 NETHER LOCHABER. 



heads and the least particle of gumption, they could easily have 

 gone to the fields and seen all this for themselves, instead of lazily 

 theorising on the origin of the apparent mystery in their dressing- 

 gowns and slippers by the fireside, and sagely ascribing the whole 

 to the agency of electricity ! There was a time, you may remember, 

 when it was the fashion to ascribe everything that people didn't 

 readily understand to electricity very convenient certainly, but if 

 you pushed these savans a little, and asked them what this electricity 

 itself was, they were incontinently dumb, or, if they talked, they 

 were bound to talk nonsense. We can forgive, and even admire, 

 the fairy dance theory, for it is full of poetry and beauty, and in 

 an age when people seldom troubled themselves to trace natural 

 phenomena to their source, it was, upon the whole, a rather happy 

 conjecture ; if it was not the actual vrai, it had of vraisemblance 

 about it enough to recommend it to the acceptance of the multitude. 

 Grant but the existence of fairies, and the rest was easy of belief. 

 The " electricity " theory, on the contrary, was unpardonable : it 

 was not only false in fact, but it had nothing whatever about it to 

 recommend it either to one's faith or fancy. Hardly more excusable 

 than the electricity theorists themselves are those authors who tell 

 us that the West received the first hint of the existence of fairies 

 from the East at the time of the Crusades, and that almost all 

 our fairy lore is traceable to the same source ; the fact being, 

 nevertheless, that Celt and Saxon, Scandinavian and Goth, Lap 

 and Fin, had their " duergar," their " elfen," without number, such 

 as dun elf en, berg-elf en, munt-elfen, f eld-elf en, wudu-elfen, sae-elfen, 

 and waeter-elfen elves, or spirits, of downs, hills, and mountains, 

 of the fields, of the woods, of the sea, and of the rivers, streams, 

 and solitary pools fairies, in short, and a complete fairy mythology, 

 long centuries before Peter the Hermit was born, or Frank and 

 Moslem dreamt of making the Holy Sepulchre a casus belli. It is 

 a curious fact in connection with fairy lore, and we have not seen 



