Such things speak to her, we know of what. They recall to her mind the saws once uttered by her mother and grandmother; ancient saws handed down for ages from woman to woman. They form a harmless reminder of the old country spirits, a touching family religion which doubtless had little power in the blustering hurly-burly of a great common dwellinghouse, but now comes back again to haunt the lonely cabin. It is a singular, a delicate world of fays and hobgoblins, made for a woman’s soul. When the great creation of the saintly Legend gets stopped and dried up, that other older, more poetic legend comes in for its share of welcome; reigns privily with gentle sway. It is the woman’s treasure; she worships and caresses it. The fay, too, is a woman, a fantastic mirror wherein she sees herself in a fairer guise. Who were these fays? Tradition says, that of yore some Gaulish queens, being proud and fanciful, did on the coming of Christ and His Apostles behave so insolently as to turn their backs upon them. In Brittany they were dancing at the moment, and never stopped dancing. Hence their hard doom; they are condemned to live until the Day of Judgment.[19] Many of them were turned into mice or rabbits; as the Kow-riggwans for instance, or Elves, who meeting at night round the old Druidic stones entangle you in their dances. The same fate befell the pretty Queen Mab, who made herself a royal chariot out of a walnut-shell. They are all rather whimsical, and sometimes ill-humoured. But can we be surprised at them, remembering their woeful lot? Tiny and odd as they are, they have a heart, a longing to be loved. They are good and they are bad and full of fancies. On the birth of a baby they come down the chimney, to endow it and order its future. They are fond of good spinning-women--they even spin divinely themselves. Do we not talk of _spinning like a fairy_? [19] All passages bearing on this point have been gathered together in two learned works by M. Maury (_Les Fées_, 1843; and _La Magie_, 1860). See also Grimm. The fairy-tales, stripped of the absurd embellishments in which the latest compilers muffled them up, express the heart of the people itself. They mark a poetic interval between the gross communism of the primitive _villa_, and the looseness of the time when a growing burgess-class made our cynical Fabliaux.[20] [20] A body of tales by the Trouvères of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.--TRANS. These tales have an historical side, reminding us, in the ogres, &c., of the great famines. But commonly they soar higher than any history, on the _Blue Bird’s_ wing, in a realm of eternal poesy; telling us our wishes which never vary, the unchangeable history of the heart.