to the husband his real wife
and new-born children. This is a Danish legend; but there is a Highland
one very similar to it. A man meets one night a troop of fairies with a
prize of some sort. Recollecting that fairies are obliged to exchange
whatever they may have with any one who offers them anything, no matter
what its value, for it, he flings his bonnet to them, calling out: "Mine
is yours, and yours is mine!" The prize which they dropped turned out to
be an English lady whom they had carried off, leaving in her place a
stock, which, of course, died and was buried. The Sassenach woman lived
for some years in the Highlander's house, until the captain in command
of an English regiment came to lodge in his house with his son, while
the soldiers were making new roads through the country. There the son
recognized his mother, and the father his wife long mourned as
dead.[102]

The death and burial of changelings, though, as here, occurring in the
tales, are not often alluded to; and there are grounds for thinking them
a special deduction of the Scottish mind. Sometimes the incident is
ghastly enough to satisfy the devoted lover of horrors. The west of
Scotland furnishes an instance in which the exchange was not discovered
until after the child's apparent death. It was buried in due course; but
suspicion having been aroused, the grave and coffin were opened, and not
a corpse but only a wooden figure was found within. A farmer at Kintraw,
in Argyllshire, lost his wife. On the Sunday after the funeral, when he
and his servants returned from church, the children, who had been left
at home, reported that their mother had been to see them, and had combed
and dressed them. The following Sunday they made the same statement, in
spite of the punishment their father had thought proper to inflict for
telling a lie on the first occasion. The next time she came the eldest
child asked her why she came, when she said that she had been carried
off by "the good people," and could only get away for an hour or two on
Sundays, and should her coffin be opened it would be found to contain
nothing but a withered leaf. The minister, however, who ridiculed the
story, refused to allow the coffin to be opened; and when, some little
time after, he was found dead near the Fairies' Hill, above Kintraw, he
was held by many to be a victim to the indignation of the fairy world he
had laughed at. Sir Walter Scott mentions the tale of a farmer's wife
in Lot