6 Natural History of the Little People. 



did not wait to answer, but whipped up the horses, and none of 

 them tried to harm me. They must have been going to a party 

 in some of the mounds round about. " That they are not 

 entirely devoid of a religious sense, however, seems to be shown 

 by the story of the tailor- brownie. He had been asked by one 

 of the men on the farm where he lived to sew something for him, 

 and as it was a bright moonlight night, he took it to the top of a 

 haystack and began to sew. Just as he was hard at work, a cloud 

 came over the moon, and he shouted impatiently, " Light ! light 

 high !" At this moment another farm man, who used to tease 

 the brownie, hit him on the feet with a flail. But the brownie thought 

 it was our Lord who was punishing him for demanding light so 

 impatiently, and said, very humbly, " Light high, light low ; light 

 just as you wish, Lord !" 



A misguided attempt was once made by some people of 

 Jutland to Christianise a brownie. They put him in a cart and 

 drove him to church to have him baptised. On the way he sat 

 and peeped out, and the people heard a voice calling to him, 

 " Where are you going to Gillikop ?" The brownie answered, " A 

 long way, Slangerop ; I am going away to a little water, where I 

 expect to be made a better man !" 



Brownies often live in church steeples, but while the bells are 

 rung they go away and hide. At Besser church there is a brownie 

 who sleeps on a bundle of rags in the church loft. When the 

 sexton came one evening to ring the bell for service, the brownie 

 played him a trick. The sexton began to pull the bell, but no 

 sound came. Then he found that the tongue of the bell had a 

 large bundle of rags tied to it, and as he stood wondering at it, he 

 saw the brownie with a red peaked cap on, grinning at him from 

 behind the bell. 



One most important piece of work which might be carried 

 out by the Welsh Folklore Society would be a comparison of the 

 folklore of various countries. It is notlknown, for instance, that 

 the brownies have tails. This, at least, is the case in Denmark, 

 according to the following account : " As everyone was eager to 

 have a brownie on his farm, the following plan used to be adopted 



