the boards above the bed: the fairies had not succeeded in bearing it
any further away. Another felt her boy being taken from her arms;
whereupon she screamed and held him tightly, and, according to her own
expression, "God and me were too hard for them." The child grew up to
become a famous preacher. A peasant woman in Mecklenburg who ventured to
sleep without a light was attacked by an elf-woman. The stranger seized
the child, but was baffled by the woman's determination; for she
struggled and shrieked for her husband, and when he hurried in with a
light the fairy vanished.[70]

Nor is it always the mother who arrests the theft. A trick frequently
played by the dwarfs in Northern Germany on the birth of a child was to
pinch a cow's ear; and when the animal bellowed and everybody ran out to
know why, a dwarf would slip indoors and effect the change. On one such
occasion the father saw his infant being dragged out of the room. In the
nick of time he grasped it and drew it towards himself. The changeling
left in its place was found in the bed; and this he kept too, defying
the efforts of the underground folk to regain it. At a place in North
Jutland it happened many years ago in a lying-in room that the mother
could get no sleep while the lights were burning. So her husband
resolved to take the child in his arm, in order to keep strict watch
over it so long as it was dark. But, unfortunately, he fell asleep; and
on being awakened by a shake of the arm, he saw a tall woman standing by
the bed, and found that he had an infant in each arm. The woman
instantly vanished; and as he had forgotten in which arm he had held his
child, there he lay without knowing which of the two children was his
own. A boy, who was watching his younger sister while his parents were
both from home, saw a small man and woman come from behind the oven.
They told him to give them the little one; and when he refused they
stepped to the cradle and endeavoured to take the babe by force. The
boy, however, was strong and bold, and laid about him with such
determination that the robbers at length took to flight. On the
Lithuanian coast of the Baltic substantially the same tale is told with
more humour. There a farmer's boy sleeping in the living-room of the
house is awakened by the proceedings of two _laumes_, or elves. They
stealthily fetch out of the bedroom the new-born babe and swathe it in
swaddling clothes of their own, while they wrap in its clothes