That such tales did once exist, and that they were related by nurses to amuse their young charges, is, I think, sufficiently proved by allusions sometimes made to Chendrouine, as our old acquaintance Cendrillon or Cinderella is called, and by the fact that a friend of mine remembers an old servant telling him the story of “Pel de Cat,” evidently the same as the English story of “Cat-skin,” which however appears in the French collections of fairy tales by the name of “Peau d’Ane.” All that my friend could recall to mind were the words in which the heroine of the tale is welcomed into a house where she seeks for shelter, and which have a rhythmical cadence that smacks strongly of antiquity:-- _“Entre, paure Pel-de-Cat, mànge, et bés, et séque té.”_ (Enter, poor Cat-skin, eat, drink, and dry yourself).[96] But the best informed among the peasantry do not hesitate in expressing their belief that the fairies were a race who lived long before the ancestors of the present occupants of the land had effected a settlement in the island; that the cromlechs were erected by them for dwelling places, and that the remains of pottery which have been from time to time discovered in these primæval structures plainly prove their derivation. That the fairy race possessed supernatural strength and knowledge there can be no doubt, or how could they have moved such enormous blocks of stone? Whether their strength and extraordinary science was a gift from Heaven, or whether they acquired these endowments by having entered into a league with the powers of darkness, is a very doubtful and disputed question. Some say they were a highly religious people, and that they possessed the gift of working miracles. Others shake their heads and say that their knowledge, though perhaps greater, was of the same nature as that possessed in later times by wizards and witches, who, as everybody knows, derive their power from the wicked one.[97] Some fifty or sixty years since, it was still firmly believed in the country that the fairies assisted the industrious, and that, if a stocking or other piece of knitting was placed at night on the hearth or at the mouth of the oven with a bowl of pap, in the morning the work would be found completed and the pap eaten. Should idleness, however, have prompted the knitter to seek the assistance of the invisible people, not only did the work remain undone and the pap uneaten, but the insult put upon them was severely revenged by blows inflicted on the offending parties during their sleep.[98] It is asserted by some old people in the neighbourhood of L’Erée that, in days gone by, if a bowl of milk porridge was taken in the evening to the “Creux des Fâïes,” and left there with a piece of knitting that it was desired to have speedily finished, and a fitting supply of worsted and knitting needles, the bowl would be found next morning emptied of its contents, and the work completed in a superior manner.[99]