146 FAIRIES AND GIANTS OF CORNWALL. | 
in the first half of the 17th Century; and the Lost Child, Johns, 
of Trevalsa, St. Allen, in June, 1684, related by Hals, and by 
Hunt. 
Some of the fairies were desirous of having a human nurse for 
their children, who were generally ill-mannered, morose, and ill- 
looking, and, instead of being children, frequently of great age, 
although of infantile size, and were secretly changed for the 
healthy child of the nurse. The unfortunate mother whose child 
was so exchanged, was grieved at the sudden sulkiness and ill- 
conduct of the changeling, but could not guess at the truth, until 
informed of it by some intelligent friend, who generally recom- 
mended some stringent proof. 
There are stories of these changelings in many countries, all 
shewing a common origin. Mr. Hunt, in his interesting Romances 
of the West of England, gives an amusing one in verse. “The 
Spriggan’s Child,” who, although an infant in size, was a married 
man with a family, hears a strange voice cry out, “Tredrill, Tredrill! 
thy wife and children greet thee well.” Notwithstanding this 
greeting, however, he declines to go back, until he has been well 
beaten on the ash-pile before the door. In the Iceland story, the 
mother, under the advice of a wise woman, sets a cauldron in the 
middle of the hearth, and fastens a number of rods together with 
a porridge spoon at the end, and sticks them into the cauldron 
with the end up the chimney. “ Well,” says the changeling, “I 
am old enough, as any one may guess from my beard, and the 
father of eighteen children, but never in all my life have I seen so 
long a spoon, to so small a put.” The mother rushes at him, and 
begins to beat him unmercifully, when a woman enters with the 
real child in her arms, and says, “See, how we differ; I cherish 
and love your son, while you abuse and ill-treat my husband” ; 
with whom she then departs, leaving the child. 
The general plan was to excite the wonder of the changeling 
by some strange operation. Our late friend Crofton Croker, in 
his valuable Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, tells how Mrs. 
Sullivan had a fine healthy, blue-eyed boy, changed for a shrivelled 
little thing, always squalling, which she thought might arise from 
disease. She consults Ellen Leah, a cunning old dame, who advises 
her to take a big pot of water and boil it, and place a dozen egg- 
shells in it, when if the child was a changeling, he would betray 
