nt, repudiating all concern for his wife and children, and
intimating his enjoyment of the life he was leading, and the spell that
was being wrought in his behalf. In the end she got rid of him by the
homely process of beating and leaving him on the ground near the old
church stile. A Sutherlandshire tradition tells of a child less than a
year old who suddenly addressed his mother in verse as he was being
carried through a wild glen. Translated, the youth's impromptu lines run
thus:--

"Many is the dun hummel cow
(Each having a calf)
In the opposite dun glen,
Without the aid of dog,
Or man, or woman, or gillie,
One man excepted,
And he grey----"

At that moment his remarks were interrupted by the terrified woman
throwing him down in the plaid which wrapt him, and scampering home,
where to her joy she found her true babe smiling in the cradle.[96]

These verses carry us back to the egg-shell episode, from which the
consideration of the means adopted to drive away the intrusive goblin
has diverted us. They contain a vague assertion of age like those then
before us, but not a hint of laughter. Nor have we found anything
throughout the whole discussion to favour Simrock's suggestion, or to
shake the opinion that the dissolution of the fairy spell was derived
either from the vexation of the supernatural folk at their own
self-betrayal, or from the disclosure to the human foster-parents of
the true state of the facts, and their consequent determination to
exorcise the demon.

It is true we have a few more stories to examine, but we shall find that
they all confirm this conclusion. The cases we have yet to deal with,
except the first, exhibit a different and much more humane treatment of
the changeling than the foregoing. The case excepted is found in
Carnarvonshire, where one infallible method of getting rid of the child
was to place it on the floor and let all present in the house throw a
piece of iron at it. The old woman who mentioned this to Professor Rhys
conjectured that the object was to convince the _Tylwyth Teg_, or fairy
people, of the intention to kill the babe, in order to induce them to
bring the right child back.[97] This would be the same motive as that
which threatened death by fire or other ill-usage, in some of the
instances mentioned above. But we could not thus account for the
requirement that iron, and only iron, was to be used; and here we have,
in fact, a superstition