the form of a ball of fire plunge into the water. But as the
mysterious beast plunged he gave the lad a parting kick, which knocked
out one of his eyes, just as the Calender was deprived of his eye in the
"Arabian Nights." Still worse was the fate that overtook a woman, who,
at midnight on New Year's Eve, when all water is turned into wine, was
foolhardy enough to go to a well. As she bent over it to draw, one came
and plucked out her eye, saying:

"All water is wine,
And thy two eyes are mine."

A variant of the story relates that the woman herself disappeared, and
gives the rhyme as

"All water is wine,
And what is thereby is mine."[41]

At the end of the last chapter we noted as a characteristic of fairy
nature the objection to be recognized and addressed by men who are
privileged to see them. We are now able to carry the generalization a
step further. For, from the instances adduced in the foregoing pages, it
is obviously a common belief that supernatural personages, without
distinction, dislike not merely being recognized and addressed, but even
being seen, or at all events being watched, and are only willing to be
manifested to humanity at their own pleasure and for their own purposes.
In the stories of the Magical Ointment it is not so much the theft as
the contravention of the implicit prohibition against prying into fairy
business that rouses elfin anger. This will appear more clearly from the
fuller consideration of cases like those mentioned in the last
paragraph, in which punishment follows directly upon the act of spying.
In Northamptonshire, we learn that a man whose house was frequented by
fairies, and who had received many favours from them, became smitten
with a violent desire to behold his invisible benefactors. Accordingly,
he one night stationed himself behind a knot in the door which divided
the living-room of his cottage from the sleeping-apartment. True to
their custom, the elves came to disport themselves on his
carefully-swept hearth, and to render to the household their usual good
offices. But no sooner had the man glanced upon them than he became
blind; and so provoked were the fairies at this breach of hospitality
that they deserted his dwelling, and never more returned to it. In
Southern Germany and Switzerland, a mysterious lady known as Dame
Berchta is reputed to be abroad on Twelfth Night. She is admittedly the
relic of a heathen goddess, one of whose attributes was t