hian, who, after being carried off by the fairies, reappeared
repeatedly on Sunday to her children, and combed their hair. On one of
these occasions the husband met her, and was told that there was one way
to recover her, namely, by lying in wait on Hallowe'en for the
procession of fairies, and stepping boldly out, and seizing her as she
passed among them. At the moment of execution, however, his heart
failed, and he lost his wife for ever. In connection with this, Scott
refers to a real event which happened at the town of North Berwick. A
widower, who was paying addresses with a view to second marriage, was
troubled by dreams of his former wife, to whom he had been tenderly
attached. One morning he declared to the minister that she had appeared
to him the previous night, stating that she was a captive in Fairyland,
and begged him to attempt her deliverance. The mode she prescribed was
to bring the minister and certain others to her grave at midnight to dig
up her body, and recite certain prayers, after which the corpse would
become animated and flee from him. It was to be pursued by the swiftest
runner in the parish, and if he could catch it before it had encircled
the church thrice, the rest were to come to his help and hold it
notwithstanding its struggles, and the shapes into which it might be
transformed. In this way she would be redeemed. The minister, however,
declined to take part in so absurd and indecent a proceeding.[103]

Absurd and indecent it would undoubtedly have been to unearth a dead
body in the expectation of any such result; but it would have been
entirely in harmony with current superstition. The stories and beliefs
examined in the present chapter prove that there has been no
superstition too gross, or too cruel, to survive into the midst of the
civilization of the nineteenth century; and the exhumation of a corpse,
of the two, is less barbarous than the torture by fire of an innocent
child. The flight, struggles, and transformation of a bespelled lady are
found both in _maerchen_ and saga: some examples of the latter will come
under our notice in a future chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[60] The belief in changelings is not confined to Europe, though the
accounts we have of it elsewhere are meagre. It is found, as we shall
see further on, in China. It is found also among the natives of the
Pacific slopes of North America, where it is death to the mother to
suckle the changeling. Dorman, p. 24, citing Ban