Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/218

196 that place. Among these we find the following. One morning at sunrise, while he was tying his garter with one foot against a low dyke, he was startled by feeling something like a rope of straw passed between his legs, and himself borne swiftly away upon it to a small brook at the foot of the southernmost hill of Eildon. Hearing a hoarse smothered laugh, he perceived he was in the power of witches or sprites; and when he came to a ford called the Brig-o’-stanes, feeling his foot touch a large stone, he exclaimed, “I’ the name o’ the Lord, ye’se get me no farther!” At that moment the rope broke, the air rang as with the laughter of a thousand voices; and as he kept his footing on the stone he heard a muttered cry, “Ah, we’ve lost the coof!”

This adventure reminds us how the ancestor of the Duffus family was spirited away from his paternal fields, and found the next day at Paris, in the royal cellars, with a silver cup in his hand. In that case, however, the victim provoked his destiny by echoing the cry of “Horse and hattock,” the elfin signal for mounting and riding off.