ferred in our chapter on Fairies, where Mercutio, in "Romeo and
Juliet" (i. 4), says:

"This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes."

In "King Lear" (ii. 3), Edgar says: "I'll ... elf all my hair in knots."

Mr. Hunt, in his "Popular Romances of the West of England" (1871, p.
87), tells us that, when a boy, he was on a visit at a farmhouse near
Fowey River, and well remembers the farmer, with much sorrow, telling
the party one morning at breakfast, how "the piskie people had been
riding Tom again." The mane was said to be knotted into fairy stirrups,
and the farmer said he had no doubt that at least twenty small people
had sat upon the horse's neck. Warburton[429] considers that this
superstition may have originated from the disease called "Plica
Polonica." Witches, too, have generally been supposed to harass the
horse, using it in various ways for their fiendish purposes. Thus, there
are numerous local traditions in which the horse at night-time has been
ridden by the witches, and found in the morning in an almost prostrate
condition, bathed in sweat.

[429] Warburton on "Romeo and Juliet," i. 4.

It was a current notion that a horse-hair dropped into corrupted water
would soon become an animal. The fact, however, is that the hair moves
like a living thing because a number of animalculae cling to it.[430]
This ancient vulgar error is mentioned in "Antony and Cleopatra" (i. 2):

"much is breeding,
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life,
And not a serpent's poison."

[430] Dyce's "Glossary," p. 104.

Steevens quotes from Churchyard's "Discourse of Rebellion," 1570:

"Hit is of kinde much worse than horses heare,
That lyes in donge, where on vyle serpents brede."

Dr. Lister, in the "Philosophical Transactions," says that these
animated horse-hairs are real thread-worms. It was asserted that these
worms moved like serpents, and were poisonous to swallow. Coleridge
tells us it was a common experiment with boys in Cumberland and
Westmoreland to lay a horse-hair in water, which, when removed after a
time, would twirl round the finger and sensibly compress it--having
become the supporter of an immense number of small, slimy water-lice.

A horse is said to have a "cloud in his face" when he has a dark