[Footnote A:  Poustie—­Power.]

[Footnote B:  Sawes—­Salves.]

[Footnote C:  Flaide—­Scared.]

“Item, That the said Mr William told her what herbs were fit to cure every disease, and how to use them; and particularlie tauld, that the Bishop of St Andrews laboured under sindrie diseases, sic as the riples, trembling, feaver, flux, &c. and bade her make a sawe, and anoint several parts of his body therewith, and gave directions for making a posset, which she made and gave him.”

For this idle story the poor woman actually suffered death.  Yet, notwithstanding the fervent arguments thus liberally used by the orthodox, the common people, though they dreaded even to think or speak about the Fairies, by no means unanimously acquiesced in the doctrine, which consigned them to eternal perdition.  The inhabitants of the Isle of Man call them the “good people, and say they live in wilds, and forests, and on mountains, and shun great cities, because of the wickedness acted therein:  all the houses are blessed where they visit, for they fly vice.  A person would be thought impudently prophane who should suffer his family to go to bed, without having first set a tub, or pail, full of clean water, for those guests to bathe themselves in, which the natives aver they constantly do, as soon as ever the eyes of the family are closed, wherever they vouchsafe to come.”—­WALDREN’s Works, p. 126.  There are some curious, and perhaps anomalous facts, concerning the history of Fairies, in a sort of Cock-lane narrative, contained in a letter from Moses Pitt, to Dr Edward Fowler, Lord Bishop of Gloucester, printed at London in 1696, and preserved in Morgan’s Phoenix Britannicus, 4to, London 1732.

Anne Jefferies was born in the parish of St Teath, in the county of Cornwall, in 1626.  Being the daughter of a poor man, she resided as servant in the house of the narrator’s father, and waited upon the narrator himself, in his childhood.  As she was knitting stockings in an arbour of the garden, “six small people, all in green clothes,” came suddenly over the garden wall; at the sight of whom, being much frightened, she was seized with convulsions, and continued so long sick, that she became as a changeling, and was unable to walk.  During her sickness, she frequently exclaimed, “They are just gone out of the window! they are just gone out of the window! do you not see them?” These expressions, as she afterwards declared, related to their disappearing.  During the harvest, when every one was employed, her mistress walked out; and dreading that Anne, who was extremely weak and silly, might injure herself, or the house, by the fire, with some difficulty persuaded her to walk in the orchard till her return.  She accidentally hurt her leg, and, at her return, Anne cured it, by stroking it with her hand.  She appeared to be informed of every particular, and asserted, that she had this information from the Fairies, who