l tale is told, and exceedingly well told--though, alas! not
exactly in the language of the natives--by Mrs. Bray in her Letters to
Southey, of a certain midwife of Tavistock. One midnight, as she was
getting into bed, this good woman was summoned by a strange,
squint-eyed, little, ugly old fellow to follow him straightway, and
attend upon his wife. In spite of her instinctive repulsion she could
not resist the command; and in a moment the little man whisked her, with
himself, upon a large coal-black horse with eyes of fire, which stood
waiting at the door. Ere long she found herself at the door of a neat
cottage; the patient was a decent-looking woman who already had two
children, and all things were prepared for her visit. When the child--a
fine, bouncing babe--was born, its mother gave the midwife some
ointment, with directions to "strike the child's eyes with it." Now the
word _strike_ in the Devonshire dialect means not to give a blow, but to
rub, or touch, gently; and as the woman obeyed she thought the task an
odd one, and in her curiosity tried the effect of the ointment upon one
of her own eyes. At once a change was wrought in the appearance of
everything around her. The new mother appeared no longer as a homely
cottager, but a beautiful lady attired in white; the babe, fairer than
before, but still witnessing with the elvish cast of its eye to its
paternity, was wrapped in swaddling clothes of silvery gauze; while the
elder children, who sat on either side of the bed, were transformed into
flat-nosed imps, who with mops and mows were busied to no end in
scratching their own polls, or in pulling the fairy lady's ears with
their long and hairy paws. The nurse, discreetly silent about what she
had done and the wonderful metamorphoses she beheld around her, got away
from the house of enchantment as quickly as she could; and the
sour-looking old fellow who had brought her carried her back on his
steed much faster than they had come. But the next market-day, when she
sallied forth to sell her eggs, whom should she see but the same
ill-looking scoundrel busied in pilfering sundry articles from stall to
stall. So she went up to him, and with a nonchalant air addressed him,
inquiring after his wife and child, who, she hoped, were both as well as
could be expected. "What!" exclaimed the old pixy thief, "do you _see_
me to-day?" "See you! to be sure I do, as plain as I see the sun in the
skies; and I see you are busy into