irits; but on one occasion,
happening to meet the fairy lady who had given her the child, she
attempted to shake hands with her. "What ee d' ye see me wi'?" whispered
she. "Wi' them baith," answered the matron. The fairy accordingly
breathed on her eyes; and even the power of the box failed afterwards to
restore their enchanted vision. A Carnarvonshire story, probably
incomplete, makes no mention of the ointment conferring supernatural
sight; but when the midwife is to be dismissed she is told to rub her
eyes with a certain salve, whereupon she at once finds herself sitting
on a tuft of rushes, and not in a palace: baby and all had disappeared.
The sequel, however, shows that by some means she had retained the power
of seeing fairies, at least with one eye; for when she next went to the
town, lo and behold! busily buying was the elf whose wife she had
attended. He betrayed the usual annoyance at being noticed by the woman;
and on learning with which eye she saw him he vanished, never more to be
looked upon by her. A tale from Guernsey attributes the magical faculty
to some of the child's saliva which fell into the nurse's eye. And a
still more extraordinary cause is assigned to it in a tradition from
Lower Brittany, where it is said to be due to the sacred bond formed
between the woman and a masculine elf when she became godmother and he
godfather to the babe.[34]

The effect of the wonder-working salve or water is differently described
in different tales. The fairy maiden Rockflower speaks of it to her
lover, in a Breton tale from Saint Cast, as "clearing his eyes like her
own." And this is evidently to be understood in all cases. Accordingly,
we find the invariable result is that the favoured mortal beholds swarms
of fairies who were invisible before. But their dwellings, their
clothing, and their surroundings in general suffer a transformation by
no means always the same. A hovel or a cavern becomes a palace, whose
inhabitants, however ugly they may be, are attired like princesses and
courtiers, and are served with vessels of silver and gold. On the other
hand a castle is changed by the magical balm into "a big rough cave,
with water oozing over the edges of the stones, and through the clay;
and the lady, and the lord, and the child, weazened, poverty-bitten
crathurs--nothing but skin and bone, and the rich dresses were old
rags." This is an Irish picture; but in the north of England it is much
the same. Instead of a