the Elfin Queen, or otherwise alluded to her
supposed connection with "the pigmy folk," yet still her perpetually
affecting to wear the colour of green, proper to the fairies, as well as
some other peculiarities, seemed voluntarily assumed by her, in order to
countenance the superstition, perhaps because it gave her more authority
among the lower orders.

Many were the tales circulated respecting the Countess's _Elf_, as
Fenella was currently called in the island; and the malcontents of
the stricter persuasion were convinced, that no one but a Papist and a
malignant would have kept near her person a creature of such doubtful
origin. They conceived that Fenella's deafness and dumbness were only
towards those of this world, and that she had been heard talking, and
singing, and laughing most elvishly, with the invisibles of her own
race. They alleged, also, that she had a _Double_, a sort of apparition
resembling her, which slept in the Countess's ante-room, or bore her
train, or wrought in her cabinet, while the real Fenella joined the song
of the mermaids on the moonlight sands, or the dance of the fairies in
the haunted valley of Glenmoy, or on the heights of Snawfell and Barool.
The sentinels, too, would have sworn they had seen the little maiden
trip past them in their solitary night walks, without their having it in
their power to challenge her, any more than if they had been as mute
as herself. To all this mass of absurdities the better informed paid no
more attention than to the usual idle exaggerations of the vulgar, which
so frequently connect that which is unusual with what is supernatural.

Such, in form and habits, was the little female, who, holding in her
hand a small old-fashioned ebony rod, which might have passed for a
divining wand, confronted Julian on the top of the flight of steps which
led down the rock from the Castle court. We ought to observe, that as
Julian's manner to the unfortunate girl had been always gentle, and free
from those teasing jests in which his gay friend indulged, with less
regard to the peculiarity of her situation and feelings; so Fenella, on
her part, had usually shown much greater deference to him than to any of
the household, her mistress, the Countess, always excepted.

On the present occasion, planting herself in the very midst of the
narrow descent, so as to make it impossible for Peveril to pass by her,
she proceeded to put him to the question by a series of gestures, w