Guernsey Folk Lore: a collection of popular superstitions, legendary tales, peculiar customs, proverbs, weather sayings, etc., of the people of that islandMacCulloch, Edgar, Sir
History
Guernsey Folk Lore: a collection of popular superstitions, legendary tales, peculiar customs, proverbs, weather sayings, etc., of the people of that island
MacCulloch, Edgar, Sir
Folklore -- Guernsey
Paul Sébillot also gives a somewhat similar story, in _Traditions et
Superstitions de La Haute Bretagne_, Tome 1., p. 116-117. “Il y avait
à la Ville-Douélan, en la paroisse du Gouray, une bonne femme qui tous
les soirs mettait son souper à chauffer dans le foyer; mais pendant
qu’elle était occupée à filer, les fées descendaient par la cheminée
et mangeaient son souper. Elle s’en plaignit à son mari, qui était
journalier et ne rentrait que pour se coucher. Il lui dit de le laisser
un soir tout seul à la maison. Il s’habilla en femme et prit une
quenouille comme une fileuse, mais il ne filait point. Quand les fées
arrivèrent, elles s’arrêtèrent surprises dans le foyer et dirent, ‘Vous
ne filez ni ne volez, vous n’êtes pas la bonne femme des autres soirs.’
L’homme ne répondit rien; mais il prit une trique et se mit à frapper
sur les fées, qui, depuis ce temps-là, ne revinrent plus jamais.”
THE CHANGELING.
In times long past a young couple occupied a cottage in the
neighbourhood of L’Erée. They were in the second year of their
marriage, and little more than a fortnight had elapsed since the wife
had presented her husband with his first-born son. The happy father,
who, like most of the inhabitants of the coast, filled up the time in
which he was not otherwise occupied, in collecting sea-weed or fishing,
returned one morning from the beach with a basketful of limpets. There
are various ways of cooking this shell-fish, which, from the earliest
times, appears to have formed a considerable article of food among the
poorer inhabitants of the sea-shore, and one of the ways of dressing
them is by placing them on the hot embers, where they are soon baked or
fried in their own cup-shaped shells. Cooked in this manner they form
an appetizing relish to the “dorâïe,” or slice of bread-and-butter,
which forms the ordinary mid-day meal of the labouring man.
A good fire of furze and sea-weed was flaming on the hearth when the
man entered his cottage, and, having raked the hot embers together, he
proceeded to arrange the limpets on the ashes, and then left them to
cook while he went out to finish digging a piece of ground. The wife in
the meanwhile was occupied in some domestic work, but casting a look
from time to time on her new-born babe, which was sleeping quietly in
its cradle. Suddenly she was startled by hearing an unknown voice,
which seemed to proceed from the child. She turned quickly round, and
was much surprised to see the infant sitting up, and looking with the
greatest interest at the fire-place, and to hear it exclaim in tones of
astonishment:--
_“Je n’sis de chut an, ni d’antan,_
_Ni du temps du Rouey Jehan,_
_Mais de tous mes jours, et de tous mes ans,_
_Je n’ai vu autant de pots bouaillants.”_
(“I’m not of this year, nor the year before,
Nor yet of the time of King John of yore,
But in all my days and years, I ween,
So many pots boiling I never have seen.”)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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