th-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of
the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits--the Vius of
Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome,
the fateful Maerae and Hathors--old imaginings of a world not yet
dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have
some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they
conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the
literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The
fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and
favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above
the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more
graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating
work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical
Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find
the mark of Sir Walter.

In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received
praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it
was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and
the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which
caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid
Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil
might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours'
by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the
night:

'Up the craggy mountain
And down the rushy glen,
We dare not go a-hunting
For fear of Little Men.

Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping altogether,
Green jerkin, red cap,
And white owl's feather.'

They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if
not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All
this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing
under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground
abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the
penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers
still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with
the Queen of Faery, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane
to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to