FAIRY PIPES. 165 
sais It is not to these, however, but to the small pipes 
ormerly used in this kingdom for smoking tobacco, and 
tobacco alone, that I wish to draw attention. Most people, 
especially in the Midland and Northern counties of England, 
as well as in Scotland and Ireland, will have heard the name 
of Fairy Pipes applied to the small, old-fashioned, and some- 
times oddly-shaped tobacco pipes which are not infrequently 
turned up in digging and plowing. and other operations. To 
these and the general forms of old English pipes, I purpose 
confining myself in the present article. Many years ago I 
collected together a large number of these ‘Fairy Pipes’ 
from all parts of the kingdom. Since then, my own researches 
have, with the aid of inquiries carried on for me, enabled 
me to bring forward many interesting points, so as to verify 
dates of manufacture and more fully to carry out their classi- 
fication. Like their Irish brethren and sisters, English people 
were formerly apt to ascribe everything unusually sinall 
to the fairies, and anything out of the common way to the 
people of very remote ages. 
“ Thus, these small pipes are commonly in England called 
‘fairy pipes,’ or ‘Carl’s pipes,’ or ‘old man’s pipes; in Ire- 
land, where they are likewise known as ‘fairy pipes,’ they 
are also called ‘ Dane’s pipes ;’ and in Scotland, where their 
common name is ‘elf pipes,’ or ‘elfin pipes,’ they are, in like 
manner, known as ‘ Celtic pipes.’ They are also sometimes 
named ‘ Mab pipes,’ or ‘Queen’s pipes,’ from the same fairy 
majesty, Queen Mab. Thus, while in each country they are 
ascribed to the elfin race—the ‘small people’ of Cornish 
folk-lore—their secondary names attach to them a popular 
belief in their extreme antiquity. Anything apparently old 
is at once, by the Irish, set down to the ‘ Danes;’ by the Scots 
to the ‘ Celts;’ and by people in the rural districts of our own 
country to the ‘carls,’ or ‘old men ’—carl being indicative of 
extreme antiquity. In Ireland, the pipes are believed to 
have belonged to the cluricaunes—a kind of wild, ungovern- 
able, mischievous fairy-demon—who were held in awe by the 
‘pisantry ;’ and whenever found, these pipes were, with much 
superstitious feeling, immediately broken up, so as to destroy 
and break up the spell their finding might have cast around 
the finder. But it was not only among the peasantry that 
this belief in the extreme antiquity of tobacco pipes existed. 
“Serious essays were written to prove their pre-historic 
origin, and to claim for them a history that in our day reads 
as arrant nonsense. In 1784, a short pipe was asserted to 
