Scotland, for example, where a
beggar, who had diagnosed a changeling, was allowed to try his hand at
disposing of it, he made a large fire on the hearth and held a black hen
over it till she struggled, and finally escaped from his grasp, flying
out by the "lum." More minute directions are given by the cunning man in
a Glamorganshire tale. After poring over his big book, he told his
distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any
other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by
the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with
feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed,
except one--presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the
_crimbil_, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which she
would know by the falling off of all her feathers. The more knowing
woman, in an Irish story, attributes the fact of the infant's being
changed to the Evil Eye; and her directions for treatment require the
mother to watch for the woman who has given it the Evil Eye, inveigle
her into the house and cut a piece secretly out of her cloak. This piece
of the cloak was then to be burnt close to the child until the smoke
made him sneeze, when the spell would be broken and her own child
restored. The writer who records this tale mentions the following mode
of proceeding as a common one, namely: to place the babe in the middle
of the cabin and light a fire round it, fully expecting it to be changed
into a sod of turf, but manifestly not intending to do bodily harm to it
independently of any such change. In Carnarvonshire a clergyman is
credited with telling a mother to cover a shovel with salt, mark a cross
in the salt, and burn it in the chamber where the child was, judiciously
opening the window first.[93] It is satisfactory to know that, so far as
the recorded cases go, the ceremony lost nothing of its power by being
thus toned down.

Fire, however, was not the only element efficacious for turning to
flight these troublesome aliens. Water's antagonism to witches is
notorious; and ample use was made of it in the old witch trials. It is
equally obnoxious to fairies and their congeners. In a Welsh story from
Radnorshire, when the mother has been by the egg-shell device convinced
of the exchange of her own twin children, she takes the goblin twins and
flings them into Llyn Ebyr; but their true kinsmen clad in blue trousers
(their usual garb) save