covered with a canopy.
The turf-seats, which occupy the sunny side of a cottage wall, is also
termed the _dais_.]

[Footnote B: In this particular, tradition coincides with the real fact;
the trial took place in 1697.]

The most formidable attribute of the elves, was their practice of
carrying away, and exchanging, children; and that of stealing human
souls from their bodies. "A persuasion prevails among the ignorant,"
says the author of a MS. history of Moray, "that, in a consumptive
disease, the Fairies steal away the soul, and put the soul of a Fairy in
the room of it." This belief prevails chiefly along the eastern coast of
Scotland, where a practice, apparently of druidical origin, is used to
avert the danger. In the increase of the March moon, withies of oak and
ivy are cut, and twisted into wreaths or circles, which they preserve
till next March. After that period, when persons are consumptive, or
children hectic, they cause them to pass thrice through these circles.
In other cases the cure was more rough, and at least as dangerous as the
disease, as will appear from the following extract:

"There is one thing remarkable in this parish of Suddie (in
Inverness-shire), which I think proper to mention. There is a small hill
N.W. from the church, commonly called Therdy Hill, or Hill of Therdie,
as some term it; on the top of which there is a well, which I had the
curiosity to view, because of the several reports concerning it. When
children happen to be sick, and languish long in their malady, so that
they almost turned skeletons, the common people imagine they are taken
away (at least the substance) by spirits, called Fairies, and the shadow
left with them; so, at a particular season in summer, they leave them
all night themselves, watching at a distance, near this well, and this
they imagine will either _end or mend them_; they say many more do
recover than do not. Yea, an honest tenant who lives hard by it, and
whom I had the curiosity to discourse about it, told me it has recovered
some, who were about eight or nine years of age, and to his certain
knowledge they bring adult persons to it; for, as he was passing one
dark night, he heard groanings, and coming to the well, he found a man,
who had been long sick, wrapped in a plaid, so that he could scarcely
move, a stake being fixed in the earth, with a rope, or tedder, that was
about the plaid; he had no sooner enquired what he was, but he conjured
him to loos