Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/437

Rh the witch's cottage, and when she got there there was the witch combing the leaven out of her hair.

"Would you like to know the results [? cause] of a family becoming poor? The mother had a baby, and she took it into the field and left it under an umbrella while she worked. And a fairy came—not a real fairy, a Hobthirst—and changed the child for her own. It was so like, the mother never knew, only that it never spoke, and so long as they had the child and were good to it money was everywhere in the house. They found it in drawers and corners everywhere. But the child died, and from that time not a penny did they get, and they were as poor as poor.

"Fairies! I went into a farmhouse to stay a night, and in the evening there came a knocking in the room as if some one had struck the table. I jumped up. My hostess got up and 'Good-night,' says she, 'I'm off.' 'But what was it?' says I. 'Just a poor old fairy,' says she, 'Old Nancy. She's a poor old thing; been here ever so long; lost her husband and her children; it's bad to be left like that, all alone. I leave a bit o' cake on the table for her, and sometimes she fetches it, and sometimes she don't.'

"I know many houses on the moors where they keep a vessel with salt in it by the fire and throw a pinch into the fire when anyone enters who has the Evil Eye."

140, Upper Brook Street, Manchester.

In the island of Sangir (Celebes) little dolls are hung up in cocoa-nut trees to protect them. Any one stealing a fruit from a tree thus guarded will become violently ill afterwards. An engraving of such an urŏ from Sangir is given in S. J. Hickson's Naturalist in North Celebes, 1889, p. 176.

Are the human and animal figures often seen on the apex of English cornstacks merely ornamental in origin, or do they represent ancient protecting powers?

In Lincolnshire they are called dozzils. By what other names are they known, and in what parts of Europe are they used?

[In Gloucestershire, I am informed, they were formerly well known, and called hackles. They are now fast disappearing.—]