w a big toad.
The woman told her maid to kill it. The latter replied: "No; I won't do
that, and I will stand sponsor for it yet once more." Not long
afterwards she was sent for to become sponsor, and was conducted into
the lake, where she found the toad now in guise of a woman. After the
ceremony was over, the lake-woman rewarded her with a bushel of straw,
and sent by her hand a girdle for her mistress. On the way home the girl
tried the girdle on a tree to see how it would look, and in a moment the
tree was torn into a thousand pieces. This was the punishment devised by
the lake-woman for her mistress, because she had wished to put her to
death while in the form of a toad. The straw was, of course, pure gold;
but the girl foolishly cast it all away except a few stalks which clung
to her dress. So a countryman who accidentally spilt some hot broth on a
witch, disguised as a toad, is presented by her another day with a
girdle for his little son. Suspecting something wrong, he tries it on
his dog, which at once swells up and bursts. This is a Saxon saga from
Transylvania; an Irish saga brings us to the same catastrophe. There a
girl meets a frog which is painfully bloated, and kicks it unfeelingly
aside, with the words: "May you never be delivered till I am midwife to
you!" Now the frog was a water-fairy dwelling in a lake, into which the
girl soon after was conveyed and compelled to become the fairy's
midwife. By way of reward she is presented with a red cloak, which, on
her way home, she hangs up in admiration on a tree. Well was it for her
that she did so, for it set the tree on fire; and had she worn it, as
she meant to do, on the following Sunday at Mass, the chapel itself
would have been in a blaze.[28]

The fairies' revenge here missed its mark, though calculated on no
trifling scale. Indeed, the rewards they bestowed were never nicely
balanced with the good or ill they intended to requite, but were
showered in open-handed fashion as by those who could afford to be
lavish. Of this we have already had several instances; a few more may be
given. At Palermo a tale is told of a midwife who was one day cooking in
her own kitchen when a hand appeared and a voice cried: "Give to me!"
She took a plate and filled it from the food she was preparing.
Presently the hand returned the plate full of golden money. This was
repeated daily; and the woman, seeing the generous payment, became more
and more free with her portions of f