“Why, sir, you see the case was this. I’d a bin to Simon Jude fair, and I stayed rather latish settling with the jobber Brown for some sheep, and so it wor past twelve o’clock at night before I come through Stowe wood; and just as I crossed Combe Water, sure enough I yeerd the piskies. I know’d very well where their ring was close by the gate, and so I stopped my horse and got off. Well, on I croped afoot till there was nothing but a gap between me and the pisky ring, and I could hear every word they said. One had got the crowder, and he was working away his elbow to the tune of ‘Green Slieves’ bravely, and the rest wor dauncing and singing and merrymaking like a stage-play. It made me just ’mazed in my head to look at ’em. Well, I thort to myself, if I could but catch one of these chaps to carry home! I’ve yeerd that there’s nothing so lucky in a house as a tame pisky. So I stooped down and I picked up a stone, oh, as big as my two fistes, and I swinged my arm and I scrashed the stone right into the ring. What a screech there was! Such a yell! and one in pertickler I yeerd screaming and hopping with a leg a-brok like a drashel. That one I was pretty sure of. But still, as it was very late, and my wife would be looking for me home, and it was dark also, so I thout I might as well come down and fetch my pisky in the morning by daylight. Well, sure enough, soon as I rose, I took one of these baskets with a cover that the women have invented--a ridicule, they call it--and down I goes to the ring. And do you know, sir, they’d a be so cunning--they’d a had the art for to carry their comrade clear off, and there wasn’t so much as a screed of one left! But, however,” said my venerable friend, seeing that I did not look quite satisfied with the evidence, “however, there the stone was that I drashed in amongst mun!” Alas! alas! how often in after-days, when I have encountered the theories of men learned in the ’ologies, and pondered the prodigious inferences which they had deduced from a stratum here and a deposit there,--how irresistibly have my thoughts recurred to old Trevarten and his amount of proof, “There the stone was that I drashed in amongst mun”! FOOTNOTES: [156] Robert Hunt has a delightful chapter on “The Elfin Creed of Cornwall,” in his “Popular Romances of the West of England.” [157] Compare “The Doom-Well of St. Madron”-- “‘Now horse and hattock, both but and ben,’ Was the cry at Lauds, with Dundagel men, And forth they pricked upon Routorr side, As goodly a raid as a king could ride.” [158] A reference to a custom, still followed to some extent in Devon and Cornwall, of paring the turf of grass-fields and burning the sods. It is called “bait-burning,” or “burning bait.” [159] “Full of wise saws and modern instances.”--_As You Like It._ APPENDICES BY THE REV. PREBENDARY ROGER GRANVILLE, THE LATE REV. W. WADDON MARTYN AND R. PEARSE CHOPE APPENDIX A (p. 8) MORWENSTOW BY R. PEARSE CHOPE