8 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



even let your better half exasperate you by complaints of her 

 dairy being rifled by them. It is true she has never ceased 

 twitting you for that unlucky night's work, when you went 

 down to the cellar, after she had retired to the upper regions, 

 and unfortunately dropping the candle and the cork of the 

 cider-barrel, had to stand all night with your finger in the 

 bung-hole, to prevent the precious liquor running out. But 

 bid her wink at fairy misdemeanours, and remind her she 

 may then be invited to fairyland herself, and come back 

 wonderfully enriched. Perhaps she may even stay there 

 altogether. Such cases are not unknown in the West. In 

 1696, it is upon record that a certain Ann Jefferies, in 

 Cornwall, "was fed for six months by a small sort of airy 

 people called fairies," and performed many strange and 

 wonderful cures on her return home with salves and medicines 

 she received from them, for which she never took a penny 

 from her patients. 



The Devon peasantry are very superstitious, and the long, 

 moonlit nights of Christmas, which are so fascinating to most 

 people, bring their special terrors to the lone farmhouse, or the 

 cottage half hidden by the pines at the side of these lanes. 

 Their fancies do not for the most part take the fatalistic hue 

 of the Welsh countryman or the still more gloomy complexion 

 of the superstitions of the Channel Islander. The Devon 

 yeoman has no fear of meeting a coffin obstructing his path 

 when benighted in the narrow lanes, which is sure to betoken 

 his own if he knocks it roughly over, or is otherwise than 

 scrupulously polite in taking off the lid and replacing it the 

 wrong way, when it instantly disappears. It is rather an un- 

 defined dread that something might come which oppresses him 

 as he looks over the glimmering waste of snow. Something 

 did assuredly come, at dead of night, some thirty years ago, to 

 the very neighbourhood wherein we have fancied our traveller 

 rambling, the angle formed about Salterton by the left bank of 



