ey are called in Gaelic)--came
under Pennant's notice so late as during that observant traveller's tour
in 1769. Being perhaps the latest news from the invisible commonwealth,
we give the tourist's own words.

"A poor visionary who had been working in his cabbage-garden (in
Breadalbane) imagined that he was raised suddenly up into the air, and
conveyed over a wall into an adjacent corn-field; that he found himself
surrounded by a crowd of men and women, many of whom he knew to have
been dead for some years, and who appeared to him skimming over the tops
of the unbending corn, and mingling together like bees going to hive;
that they spoke an unknown language, and with a hollow sound; that they
very roughly pushed him to and fro, but on his uttering the name of God
all vanished, but a female sprite, who, seizing him by the shoulder,
obliged him to promise an assignation at that very hour that day
seven-night; that he then found his hair was all tied in double knots
(well known by the name of elf-locks), and that he had almost lost his
speech; that he kept his word with the spectre, whom he soon saw
floating through the air towards him; that he spoke to her, but she told
him she was at that time in too much haste to attend to him, but bid him
go away and no harm should befall him, and so the affair rested when I
left the country. But it is incredible the mischief these _aegri somnia_
did in the neighbourhood. The friends and neighbours of the deceased,
whom the old dreamer had named, were in the utmost anxiety at finding
them in such bad company in the other world; the almost extinct belief
of the old idle tales began to gain ground, and the good minister will
have many a weary discourse and exhortation before he can eradicate the
absurd ideas this idle story has revived."[38]

[Footnote 38: Pennant's "Tour in Scotland," vol. i. p. 110.]

It is scarcely necessary to add that this comparatively recent tale is
just the counterpart of the story of Bessie Dunlop, Alison Pearson, and
of the Irish butler who was so nearly carried off, all of whom found in
Elfland some friend, formerly of middle earth, who attached themselves
to the child of humanity, and who endeavoured to protect a fellow-mortal
against their less philanthropic companions.

These instances may tend to show how the fairy superstition, which, in
its general sense of worshipping the _Dii Campestres_, was much the
older of the two, came to bear upon and have con