Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/146

 woman lived for some years in the Highlander's house, until the captain in command of an English regiment came to lodge in his house with his son, while the soldiers were making new roads through the country. There the son recognized his mother, and the father his wife long mourned as dead.

The death and burial of changelings, though, as here, occurring in the tales, are not often alluded to; and there are grounds for thinking them a special deduction of the Scottish mind. Sometimes the incident is ghastly enough to satisfy the devoted lover of horrors. The west of Scotland furnishes an instance in which the exchange was not discovered until after the child's apparent death. It was buried in due course; but suspicion having been aroused, the grave and coffin were opened, and not a corpse but only a wooden figure was found within. A farmer at Kintraw, in Argyllshire, lost his wife. On the Sunday after the funeral, when he and his servants returned from church, the children, who had been left at home, reported that their mother had been to see them, and had combed and dressed them. The following Sunday they made the same statement, in spite of the punishment their father had thought proper to inflict for telling a lie on the first occasion. The next time she came the eldest child asked her why she came, when she said that she had been carried off by "the good people," and could only get away for an hour or two on Sundays, and should her coffin be opened it would be found to contain nothing but a withered leaf. The minister, however, who ridiculed the story, refused to allow the coffin to be opened; and when, some little time after, he was found dead near the Fairies' Hill, above Kintraw, he was held by many to be a victim to the indignation of the fairy world he had laughed at. Sir Walter Scott mentions the tale of a farmer's