Or was it man, or vile woman,
My ain true love, that misshaped thee?'

Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious
stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved
weird. In _King Henrie_, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the
mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest,
when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and

'A grisly ghost
Stands stamping on the floor.'

The manners of this _Poltergeist_ are in keeping with her rough entrance
on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had
devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the _Wife of Bath's
Tale_, and the _Marriage of Sir Gawain_ and other legends of the same
type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded
for having given the lady her will:

'When day was come and night was gane
And the sun shone through the ha',
The fairest ladye that e'er was seen
Lay between him and the wa'.'

In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these
wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They
are apt to prove to be of the race of the _succubi_, from whom a kiss
means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are
reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, _The Lord Nann_, so
admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken
to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a
wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast
to the grave. _Alison Gross_ is another of those Circes who, by
incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her
lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the
tempter is of the other sex. Thus _The Demon Lover_ is a tale known in
several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr.
Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home,
and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a
pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been
quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:

'He turned him right and round about,
And the tear blindit his e'e;
"I would never have trodden on Irish ground
If it hadna been for thee."'

They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to
a monstrous stature; the