Echoes From Fairyland.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 335, 19 January 1889, Page 4

Echoes From Fairyland.

Amove: Lho good cottagers of Sutherland tyie old faiths arc indeed not dead. Here ore some stories that they tell, and firmly belicvo. A woman when out shorn ing laid her baby down under a hedge, and went back from time to time to look at it. She was going once to give it suck when it began to yell and eiy in such a frightful way that she wa.s quite alarmed. ' Lay it clown and leave it, as you -\alue your child,' said a man reaping near her. "iJalf-an-hour later she enrao back, and, finding the child appaieutly in its right mind apcain, she gave it tho breast. The man smiled, and told her that he had seen her own infant carried o(F by the ' good people,' and a fairy changoling left in its place. When the ' folk ' saw that their screaming little imp was not noticed, and would get nothing, they thought it be&t to take io back at once, and replace the little boy. An old man sat in the gloaming by a dyke in Strath Oikel. It was Sunday ovening ; he read in a Gaelic psalm-book, and he was alone. Suddenly ho porceived that the mist bad rolled up close to him, and he felt a cold sough or swirl of Avind in his face, so strong that it made him look up. A voice called, 'Geordle, 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. 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 tho kind called ' dressed fairies,' affecting greon clothe. 0 , horns, bagpipes, reel-tunes, and hounds. They hunt three or four days in the week, and have their meets and morts lileo their botters. Donald Cow, as he sat resting after ploughing, once heard the hunt, and all • the horns of el fland' faintly blowing. Two strangelooking hounds, with hanging tongues and forbidding aspect bounded up to him and sniffed afc his knee. Pie was horribly frightoned, *vhen a voice cried, ' Down ! It's only old Donald Gow ! Let him bo.' — From tho ' Folklore of Sutherland,' by Miss Dempster, in the ' Folklore Journal.'

We quote a few lines of Sir George Trevelyan's eulogy of the Good Old Times, written about 1866 :—: — When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork, No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork ; But now that Jack gets beef and grcena, and next his skin wears flannel, The " Standard " says wo'vo not a ship in plight to keep the Channel.'