“Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies green.” In fact we meet with them of all colours; as in the same play— “Fairies black, grey, green, and white.” That white, on some occasions, was the dress of a female, we learn from Reginald Scot. He gives a charm “to go invisible by [means of] these three sisters of fairies,” _Milia_, _Achilia_, _Sibylia_: “I charge you that you doo appeare before me visible, in forme and shape of faire women, in white vestures, and to bring with you to me the ring of invisibilitie, by the which I may go invisible at mine owne will and pleasure, and that in all hours and minutes.” It was fatal, if we may believe Shakespeare, to speak to a fairy. Falstaff, in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, is made to say, “They are fairies. He that speaks to them shall die.” They were accustomed to enrich their favourites, as we learn from the clown in _A Winter’s Tale_— “It was told me I should be rich by the fairies.” They delighted in neatness, could not endure sluts, and even hated fibsters, tell–tales, and divulgers of secrets, whom they would slily and severely bepinch when they little expected it. They were as generous and benevolent, on the contrary, to young women of a different description, procuring them the sweetest sleep, the pleasantest dreams, and, on their departure in the morning, always slipping a tester in their shoe. They are supposed by some to have been malignant, but this, it may be, was mere calumny, as being utterly inconsistent with their general character, which was singularly innocent and amiable. Imogen, in Shakespeare’s _Cymbeline_, prays, on going to sleep— “From fairies, and the tempters of the night, Guard me, beseech you.” It must have been the _Incubus_ she was so afraid of. Hamlet, too, notices this imputed malignity of the fairies:— “... Then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm.” Thus, also, in _The Comedy of Errors_:— “A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough.” They were amazingly expeditious in their journeys. Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, answers Oberon, who was about to send him on a secret expedition— “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.” Again the same goblin addresses him thus:— “Fairy king, attend and mark, I do hear the morning lark. _Obe._ Then, my queen, in silence sad, Trip we after the night’s shade— We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wand’ring moon.” In another place Puck says— “My fairy lord this must be done in haste; For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards,” etc. To which Oberon replies—