ale a woman is entrusted in her own house with the
care of an elf-child. The child brought remarkable prosperity to the
house, and his foster-mother grew very fond of him. Finding that a
certain water in which she was required to wash his face made it very
bright, she determined to try it on her own, and splashed some of it
into her eye. This conferred the gift of seeing the little people, who
played with her boy, but had hitherto been invisible to her; and one day
she was surprised to meet her nursling's father in the market--stealing.
Recognition followed, and the stranger exclaimed:

"Water for elf, not water for self,
You've lost your eye, your child, and yourself."

From that hour she was blind in the right eye. When she got home the boy
was gone; and she and her husband, who had once been so happy, became
poor and wretched.[38]

Here poverty and wretchedness, as well as the loss of an eye, were
inflicted. In a Northumbrian case the foster-parent lost his charge and
both eyes. So in a story from Guernsey, the midwife, on the Saturday
following her attendance on the lady, meets the husband and father in a
shop filling his basket to right and left. She at once comprehends the
plenty that reigned in his mysterious dwelling. "Ah, you wicked thief, I
see you!" she cried. "You see me; how?" he inquired. "With my eyes," she
replied. "In that case I will soon put you out of power to play the
spy," he answered. So saying, he spat in her face, and she became blind
on the spot. A Danish story also relates that a midwife, who had
inadvertently anointed her eyes with the salve handed to her by the
elf-folk for the usual purpose, was going home afterwards and passed by
a rye-field. The field was swarming with elves, who were busy clipping
off the ears of rye. Indignantly she cried out: "What are you doing
there?" The little people thronged round her, and angrily answered: "If
thou canst see us, thus shalt thou be served;" and suiting the action to
the word, they put out her eyes.[39]

Human beings, however, betray their meddling with fairy ointment in
other ways than by speech. The following curious story was related as
current at his native place, by Dr. Carre of St. Jacut-de-la-Mer, to M.
Sebillot. A fisherman from St. Jacut was the last to return one evening
at dusk from the scene of his labours; and as he walked along the wet
sand of the seashore, he suddenly came upon a number of sea-fairies in a
cavern, talking