Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/224

 200 beautiful regions and cities, inhabited by beings of the fairy race, and occasionally made accessible to mortals, who, after staying for a time amid splendid sights and entertainments, were allowed to return to upper air. In Ireland and Wales there are many lakes of which such stories are told, and various forms of allied beliefs are found in classical and mediaeval traditions. In India nothing corresponding to the poetical fairy mythology of Europe is known, and all popular superstitions are forms of devil-worship and belief in beings always evil and malevolent, personified diseases, and spiteful goblins. Once, however, I was surprised by meeting with an account much resembling the legends of under-water countries in Europe. It appeared in an Indian newspaper, from which this is taken verbatim:

This bears a remarkable resemblance to the well-known tale of Elidurus, related by Giraldus Cambrensis, and is, I think, worth preserving as a modern instance of the belief on which that legend is founded. For even if we suppose the boy to have been a conscious romancer, his tale seems to have been implicitly believed by the people of his neighbourhood.