even more graphically, for when he saw an egg-shell
boiling on the fire having one end of a measuring rod set in it, he
crept out of the cradle on his hands, leaving his feet still inside, and
stretched himself out longer and longer until he reached right across
the floor and up the chimney, when he exclaimed: "Well! seven times have
I seen the wood fall in Lessoe Forest, but never till now have I seen so
big a ladle in so small a pot!" And the Danish story I have cited above
represents the child as saying that he has seen a young wood thrice upon
Tiis Lake.[84] The Welsh fairies are curiously youthful compared with
these hoary infants, which is all the more remarkable when the daring
exaggerations of Cambrian story-tellers are considered. It is a modest
claim only to have seen the acorn before the oak and the egg before the
hen, yet that is all that is put forward. In one of the Lays of Marie de
France the wood of Brezal is indicated as the spot where the oak was
seen.[85] The formula thus variously used would appear to be a common
one to describe great antiquity, and in all probability itself dates
back to a very remote period.

But changelings frequently conform to the more civilized usage of
measuring their age by years. And various are the estimates given us,
from fifteen hundred years in the Emerald Isle down to the computation,
erring perhaps on the other side, of the young gentleman in the English
tale, who remarks: "Seven years old was I before I came to the nurse,
and four years have I lived since, and never saw so many milk-pans
before." A yet more mysterious hint as to her earlier life is dropped by
an imp in Brittany. She has been treated to the sight of milk boiling in
egg-shells, and cries: "I shall soon be a hundred years old, but I never
saw so many shells boiling! I was born in Pif and in Paf, in the country
where cats are made; but I never saw anything like it!"[86] To all
right-minded persons this disclosure contained sufficient warrant for
her reputed mother to repudiate her as a witch, though cats are no less
intimate with fairies than with conjurers.

Simrock, in his work on German mythology already cited, inclines to the
opinion that the object of the ceremony which the suspected child is
made to witness is to produce laughter. He says: "The dwarf is no
over-ripe beauty who must keep her age secret. Rather something
ridiculous must be done to cause him to laugh, because laughter brings
delivera