Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/78

64 could be cured by the "arrowhead." The water in which it had been boiled was good for eye diseases and for the pangs of childbirth; it was also valued by the cattle-doctor, down to the present generations. Both are called thunderbolts, but the Rev. J. G. Campbell, who is quoted by Johnson in connection with stone arrowheads, described one of these objects as a smooth, slippery black stone, shaped like the sole of a shoe, and called it a "fairy spade." There seems, however, to have been some confusion here, for obviously this stone from the description' of its shape is our familiar stone axehead. A Scotch gentleman, writing in 1664, relates how a lady who was riding one day discovered one of these arrowheads or elf-bolts in the breast of her habit, and how a horseman found one which had been placed by a fairy in the top of his riding-boot. Robert Kirk (1691) in his Secret Commonwealth describes these "Armes (solid earthly Bodies)" as "cut by Airt and Tools it seems beyond humane," and as having "something of the Nature of Thunderbolt subtilty." "They are flung like a Dairt, with great Force, and mortally wound the vital Parts without breaking the Skin." Again, mounted in frames, small arrowheads were worn as amulets around the necks of Scottish ladies. A specially good example of this was the old-time witch-brooch, a little silver heart formerly pinned to the child's underclothing at its first dressing by the peasantry of Aberdeenshire. The shape is believed to have been derived from its being originally the mounting of an elf-shot or fairy dart, i.e. flint arrowhead. An old man in Kincardineshire thirty years ago had a "fairy dart" as a safeguard against witchcraft. Lastly, we may add one special use of the stone arrowhead in the witchcraft of Scotland. They were used in