are, but to be re-christened
would cure her. She often hears her mother call her. In one story she
vanished on being reproached with her origin, and in another on being
asked how she became a nightmare.[199]

An Esthonian tale speaks of a father who found his little boy one night
in an unquiet slumber. He noticed over the bed a hole in the wall
through which the wind was whistling, and thought it was this which was
disturbing him. Wherefore he stopped it up; and no sooner had he done so
than he saw on the bed by the boy's side a pretty little girl, who
teased and played with him so that he could not sleep in peace. The
child was thus forced to stay in the house. She grew up with the other
children, and being quick and industrious was beloved by all. Specially
was she dear to the boy in whose bed she was found; and when he grew up
he married her. One Sunday in church she burst out laughing during the
sermon. After the service was over the husband inquired what she was
laughing at. She refused to tell him, save on condition of his telling
her in return how she came into his father's house. When she had
extracted this promise from him, she told him she saw stretched on the
wall of the church a great horse-skin, on which the Evil One was writing
the names of all those who slept or chattered in church, and paid no
heed to God's word. The skin was at last full of names; and in order to
find room for more the Devil had to pull it with his teeth, so as to
stretch it further. In so doing he bumped his head against the wall, and
made a wry face: whereat she, who saw it, laughed. When they got home
her husband pulled out the piece of wood which his father had put into
the hole; and the same instant his wife was gone. The husband was
disconsolate, but he saw her no more. It was said, however, that she
often appeared to his two children in secret, and brought them precious
gifts. In Smaland a parallel legend is current, according to which the
ancestress of a certain family was an elf-maid who came into the house
with the sunbeams through a knot-hole in the wall, and, after being
married to the son and bearing him four children, vanished the same way
as she had come. In North Germany it is believed that when seven boys,
or seven girls, are born in succession, one among them is a nightmare. A
man who had unknowingly wedded such a nightmare found that she
disappeared from his bed at nights; and on watching her he discovered
that she sl