Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/137

 then to be burnt close to the child until the smoke made him sneeze, when the spell would be broken and her own child restored. The writer who records this tale mentions the following mode of proceeding as a common one, namely: to place the babe in the middle of the cabin and light a fire round it, fully expecting it to be changed into a sod of turf, but manifestly not intending to do bodily harm to it independently of any such change. In Carnarvonshire a clergyman is credited with telling a mother to cover a shovel with salt, mark a cross in the salt, and burn it in the chamber where the child was, judiciously opening the window first. It is satisfactory to know that, so far as the recorded cases go, the ceremony lost nothing of its power by being thus toned down.

Fire, however, was not the only element efficacious for turning to flight these troublesome aliens. Water's antagonism to witches is notorious; and ample use was made of it in the old witch trials. It is equally obnoxious to fairies and their congeners. In a Welsh story from Radnorshire, when the mother has been by the egg-shell device convinced of the exchange of her own twin children, she takes the goblin twins and flings them into Llyn Ebyr; but their true kinsmen clad in blue trousers (their usual garb) save them, and the mother receives her own again. In other tales she drops the twins into the river; but in one case the witch who has been credited with the change bathes the child at a mountain spout, or pistyll, and exacts a promise from the mother to duck him in cold water every morning for three months. It is not very surprising to learn that "at the end of that time there was no finer infant in the Cwm."