244 Fairy Beliefs in Galloway. 



disagreeable thing was left in its place. When asked if she 

 herself believed this, the young woman said that her mother 

 told her so, and she had often herself seen the fairies' foot- 

 prints in the snow, and that many of her friends had seen the 

 fairies themselves, and when I asked what they were like she 

 told me they were " kind of old folk " who wore old clothes 

 and lived under the hill, and you must never build anywhere 

 near their dwellings or mounds or else some dreadful mis- 

 fortunes would follow you. In some parts of Scotland it is 

 believed that idiots are changelings placed by the fairies in 

 the cradle, and Sir Arthur Mitchell remembers three cases in 

 which this was said to him. Dwarfs, or hideously deformed 

 babies, were also put into cradles, and the mothers' taken 

 away. 



It is curious to note the traditions of fairies stealing 

 children in Wales, where they always preferred those whose 

 skin was fair and whose hair was almost white or of the 

 lightest yellow. They themselves were supposed to have 

 black hair with yellow skins, and to have been small and of 

 unprepossessing appearance (it would seem that in every 

 country fairies have quite a different appearance). There 

 were various charms used to obtain the restoration of stolen 

 children, and one of the fourteenth century was to take an 

 egg shell and proceed to brew beer in it in a chamber aside, 

 then to drop the changeling into the river, and on her return 

 home the mother would find that her own child had been 

 brought back. In Brittany there is a similar story. Un- 

 christened infants were mostly liable to be stolen, and in the 

 Highlands only forty years ago, at Loch Eck, the old custom 

 of putting the Bible under the mother's pillow with a piece of 

 her wedding dress was quite usual, and a fire or light was 

 carried three times round her bed after a birth as a protection 

 against fairies. In connection with this fear of babies being 

 stolen before baptism, an old lady of ninety-four at Port- 

 william, who still retains all her faculties and memory, told 

 her doctor lately that in her girlhood in Portwilliam there were 

 quite a number of Roman Catholics in the neighbourhood, 

 and these were particularly superstitious regarding spirits. 

 One specially she remembered was in great fear lest the 



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