arved in the likeness of the lady
and laid in her place, the husband and friends being deceived into
believing it to be herself. A man returning home at night overhears the
supernatural beings at work. He listens and catches the words: "Mak' it
red cheekit an' red lippit like the smith o' Bonnykelly's wife."
Mastering the situation he runs off to the smith's house, and sains the
new mother and her babe. And he is only just in time, for hardly has he
finished than a great thud is heard outside. On going out a piece of
bog-fir is found,--the image the fairies intended to substitute for the
smith's wife. In North German and Danish tales it is the husband who
overhears the conspirators at work, and he often has coolness enough to
watch their proceedings on his return home and, bouncing out upon them,
to catch them just as they are about to complete their crime. Thus, one
clever fellow succeeded in retaining both his wife and the image already
put into her bed, which he thrust into the oven to blaze and crackle in
the sight and hearing of his wife's assembled friends, who supposed he
was burning her until he produced her to their astonished gaze. A tale
from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding
his wife, a woman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he
piles up a great fire and threatens to throw the occupant of the bed
upon it unless she tells him what has become of his own wife. She then
confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been
appointed successor; but by his determination he happily succeeds in
recapturing his own at a certain fairy knoll near Inverness.[101]

It happens occasionally that these victims of elfin gallantry are
rescued by other men than their husbands. A smith at work one day hears
a great moaning and sobbing out of doors. Looking out he sees a troll
driving a pregnant woman before him, and crying to her continually: "A
little further yet! a little further yet!" He instantly springs forward
with a red-hot iron in his hand, which he holds between the troll and
his thrall, so that the former has to abandon her and take to flight.
The smith then took the woman under his protection, and the same night
she was delivered of twins. Going to the husband to console him for his
loss, he is surprised to find a woman exactly resembling his friend's
wife in her bed. He saw how the matter stood, and seizing an axe he
killed the witch on the spot, and restored