one else uses it it will lose all its
virtue."

When the girl returned to the village at last it was to find her
mother dead, her brothers gone abroad, and her sisters married, so
that she was the only one left at home. As she was pretty and a good
housewife she did not want for lovers, and in due time she chose one
for a husband. She did not tell her spouse about the purse she had had
from the fairies, and if she wanted to give him a piece of gold she
withdrew it from the magic purse in secret. She never went back to the
fairy cavern, as she had no mind to return from it and find her
husband an old man.

_The Fisherman and the Fairies_

A fisherman of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, walking home to his cottage from
his boat one evening along the wet sands, came, unawares, upon a
number of fairies in a _houle_. They were talking and laughing gaily,
and the fisherman observed that while they made merry they rubbed
their bodies with a kind of ointment or pomade. All at once, to the
old salt's surprise, they turned into ordinary women. Concealing
himself behind a rock, the fisherman watched them until the now
completely transformed immortals quitted their haunt and waddled away
in the guise of old market-women.

[Illustration: FAIRIES IN A BRETON 'HOULE']

The fisherman waited until they were well out of sight, and then
entered the cavern, where the first object that met his gaze was the
pot of ointment which had effected the marvellous change he had
witnessed. Taking some of the pomade on his forefinger, he smeared it
around his left eye. He afterward found that he could penetrate the
various disguises assumed by the fairies wherever he met them, and
that these were for the most part adopted for the purposes of
trickery. Thus he was able to see a fairy in the assumed shape of a
beggar-woman going from door to door demanding alms, seeking an
opportunity to steal or work mischief, and all the while casting
spells upon those who were charitable enough to assist her. Again, he
could distinguish real fish caught in his net at sea from merwomen
disguised as fish, who were desirous of entangling the nets or
otherwise distressing and annoying the fishermen.

But nowhere was the disguised fairy race so much in evidence as at the
fair of Ploubalay, where he recognized several of the elusive folk in
the semblance of raree-showmen, fortune-tellers, and the like, who had
taken these shapes in order to deceive. He was quietly smiling