Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/227

 Rh that they seek for their children, probably some spiritual ones are hoped for by adoption or by a marriage with human beings (as in the romantic legend of Undine), and they are therefore tempted to foist their evil-disposed little ones on us. They never maltreat those they carry away.

v.—.

An old man sat in the gloaming by a dyke in Strath Oikel. It was Sunday evening; he read in a Gaelic Psalm-book, and he was alone. Suddenly he perceived that the mist had rolled up close to him, and he felt a cold sough or swirl of wind in his face, so strong that it made him look up. A voice called "Geordie, are you seeing anything there for us?" "No," he said, when there was a loud, an exceedingly loud and sharp cry, as of one in distress, which wailed away among the echoes of the rocks till it died up the valley.

vi.—.

Three conical hills all much of the same- shape and size, and of which two have the same name (Torr Berrichan), are the principal haunts of the fairies in Sutherland. They are of the kind called "Dressed fairies," affecting green clothes, horns, bagpipes, reel-tunes, and hounds. They hunt three or four days in the week, and have their meets and morts like their betters. Donald Gow, as he sat resting after ploughing, once heard the hunt, and all "the horns of elfland" faintly blowing. Two strange-looking hounds, with hanging tongues and forbidding aspects, bounded up to him and sniffed at his knee. He was horribly frightened, when a voice cried, "Down! It's only old Donald Gow! Let him be."—(W. Graham's sister.)

vii.—.

Duncan, surnamed Mohr, a respectable farmer in Badenoch, states as follows:—A matter of thirty summers ago, when I was cutting peats on the hill, my old mother that was was keeping the house. It