Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/137

 Fairies. 125 loses the sight of it by a blow from an angry pisky's fist. She meets and recognizes the father at a fair where, as usual, he is pilfering, and foolishly asks after the welfare of mother and child. But all these stories in West Cornwall would be told of the "small people," as well as the well-known "Colman Grey" (of course the name varies), which relates how a farmer one day found a poor, half-starved looking bantling, sitting alone in the middle of a field, whom he took home and fed until he grew quite 'strong and lively. A short time after a shrill voice was suddenly heard calling thrice upon " Colman Grey." Upon which the imp cried " Ho ! ho ! ho ! my daddy is come ! " flew through the keyhole, and was never heard of after. Unbaptised children were, in this county at the beginning of the century, said to turn, when they died, into piskies ; they gradually -went through many transformations at each change, getting smaller until at last they became " Meryons "* (ants) and finally disappeared. Another tra- dition is that they were Druids, who, because they would not believe in Christ, were for their sins condemned to change first into piskies ; gradually getting smaller, they too, as ants, at last are lost. It is on account of these legends considered unlucky to destroy an ant's nest, and a piece of tin put into one could, in bygone days, through pisky power be transmuted into silver, pro- vided that it was inserted at some varying lucky moment about the time of the new moon. Moths were formerly believed in Cornwall to be departed souls, and are still, in some districts, called piskies. There is also a green bug which infests bramble-bushes in the late autumn that bears the same name, and one of the reasons assigned for blackberries not being good after Michaelmas is that pisky spoils them then. Pisky is in some places invoked for luck at the swarming of bees. It was once a common custom in East Cornwall, when houses were built, to leave holes in the walls by which these little beings could enter ; to stop them up would drive away good luck. And in lleryon."
 * The word Meryons is also used in Cornwall as a term of endearment, " She's faather's little