not forget the Reverend
Robert Kirke, minister of the Gospel, the first translator of the Psalms
into Gaelic verse. He was, in the end of the seventeenth century,
successively minister of the Highland parishes of Balquidder and
Aberfoyle, lying in the most romantic district of Perthshire, and within
the Highland line. These beautiful and wild regions, comprehending so
many lakes, rocks, sequestered valleys, and dim copsewoods, are not even
yet quite abandoned by the fairies, who have resolutely maintained
secure footing in a region so well suited for their residence. Indeed,
so much was this the case formerly, that Mr. Kirke, while in his latter
charge of Aberfoyle, found materials for collecting and compiling his
Essay on the "Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People
heretofore going under the name of Elves, Fawnes, and Fairies, or the
like."[36] In this discourse, the author, "with undoubting mind,"
describes the fairy race as a sort of astral spirits, of a kind betwixt
humanity and angels--says, that they have children, nurses, marriages,
deaths, and burials, like mortals in appearance; that, in some respect,
they represent mortal men, and that individual apparitions, or
double-men, are found among them, corresponding with mortals existing on
earth. Mr. Kirke accuses them of stealing the milk from the cows, and of
carrying away, what is more material, the women in pregnancy, and
new-born children from their nurses. The remedy is easy in both cases.
The milk cannot be stolen if the mouth of the calf, before he is
permitted to suck, be rubbed with a certain balsam, very easily come by;
and the woman in travail is safe if a piece of cold iron is put into the
bed. Mr. Kirke accounts for this by informing us that the great northern
mines of iron, lying adjacent to the place of eternal punishment, have a
savour odious to these "fascinating creatures." They have, says the
reverend author, what one would not expect, many light toyish books
(novels and plays, doubtless), others on Rosycrucian subjects, and of an
abstruse mystical character; but they have no Bibles or works of
devotion. The essayist fails not to mention the elf-arrow heads, which
have something of the subtlety of thunderbolts, and can mortally wound
the vital parts without breaking the skin. These wounds, he says, he has
himself observed in beasts, and felt the fatal lacerations which he
could not see.

[Footnote 36: The title continues:--"Among the