Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/130

 the oak and the egg before the hen, yet that is all that is put forward. In one of the Lays of Marie de France the wood of Brezal is indicated as the spot where the oak was seen. The formula thus variously used would appear to be a common one to describe great antiquity, and in all probability itself dates back to a very remote period.

But changelings frequently conform to the more civilized usage of measuring their age by years. And various are the estimates given us, from fifteen hundred years in the Emerald Isle down to the computation, erring perhaps on the other side, of the young gentleman in the English tale, who remarks: "Seven years old was I before I came to the nurse, and four years have I lived since, and never saw so many milk-pans before." A yet more mysterious hint as to her earlier life is dropped by an imp in Brittany. She has been treated to the sight of milk boiling in egg-shells, and cries: "I shall soon be a hundred years old, but I never saw so many shells boiling! I was born in Pif and in Paf, in the country where cats are made; but I never saw anything like it!" To all right-minded persons this disclosure contained sufficient warrant for her reputed mother to repudiate her as a witch, though cats are no less intimate with fairies than with conjurers.

Simrock, in his work on German mythology already cited, inclines to the opinion that the object of the ceremony which the suspected child is made to witness is to produce laughter. He says: "The dwarf is no over-ripe beauty who must keep her age secret. Rather something ridiculous must be done to cause him to