Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/142

 of festival, he approached and stuck the dirk into the threshold. The object of this was to prevent the entrance from closing upon him. Then he steadily advanced, protected from harm by the Bible at his breast. Within, his boy (who was thirteen or fourteen years of age) was working at the forge; but when the man demanded him the elves burst into a loud laugh, which aroused the cock in his arms. The cock at once leaped upon his shoulders, flapped his wings, and crowed loud and long. The enraged elves thereupon cast the man and his son both out of the hill, and flung the dirk after them; and in an instant all was dark. It should be added that for a year and a day afterwards the boy did no work, and scarcely spoke; but he ultimately became a very famous smith, the inventor of a specially fine and well-tempered sword. The changeling himself in one of Lady Wilde's tales directs his foster-mother to Fairyland. The way thither was down a well; and she was led by the portress, an old woman, into the royal palace. There the queen admits that she stole the child, "for he was so beautiful," and put her own instead. The re-exchange is effected, and the good woman is feasted with food which the fairies cannot touch, because it has been sprinkled with salt. When she found herself again at home, she fancied she had only been away an hour: it was three years.

But it was not always necessary to incur the risk of going as far as the other world. The Glamorganshire woman, whose successful cooking of a black hen has been already referred to, had first to go at full moon to a place where four roads met, and hide herself to watch the fairy procession which passed at midnight. There in the midst of the music and the Bendith en mammau she beheld her own dear little child. One of the most interesting changeling stories was gravely related in the "Irish Fireside " for the 7th of January 1884, concerning