Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/344

 288 The fairies claim our attention next, and as the only other fairies tolerably well known to me are those of Wales, I can only compare, or contrast, the Manx fairies with the Welsh ones. They are called in Manx, Sleih Beggey, or Little People, and Ferrishyn, from the English word fairies, as it would seem. Like the Welsh fairies, they kidnap babies; and I have heard it related how a woman in Dalby had a struggle with the fairies over her baby, which they were trying to drag out of the bed from her. Like Welsh fairies, also, they take possession of the hearth after the farmer and his family are gone to bed. A farmer in Dalby used to hear them making a big fire in his kitchen: he used to hear the crackling and burning of the fire when nobody else could have been there except the fairies and their friends. I said "friends", for they sometimes take a man with them, and allow him to eat with them at the expense of others. Thus, some men from the northernmost parish, Kirk Bride, went once on a time to Port Erin, in the South, to buy a supply of fish for the winter, and with them went a Kirk Michael man who had the reputation of being a persona grata with the fairies. Now one of the Port Erin men asked a man from the North who the Michael man might be: he was curious to know his name, as he had seen him once before, and then the Michael man was with the fairies at his house—the Port Erin man's house—regaling himself with bread and cheese in company with the fairies.

Like Welsh fairies, the Manx ones take men away with them and detain them for years. Thus a Kirk Andreas man was absent from his people for four years, which he spent with the fairies. He could not tell how he returned, but it seemed as if, having been unconscious, he woke up at last in this world. The other world, however, in which he was for the four years was not far away, as he could see what his brothers and the rest of the family were doing every day, although they could not see him. To prove this, he mentioned to them how they were occupied on such and such