of Menstrie,[1] in Fife, who possessed a charming spouse, had given offence to the "unseelie" court, and was, in consequence, deprived of his fair helpmate. His distress was aggravated by hearing his wife singing in the air-- "Oh! Alva woods are bonnie, Tillicoultry hills are fair; But, when I think o' the bonnie braes o' Menstrie, It mak's my heart aye sair." After many attempts to procure her restoration, the Miller chanced one day, in riddling some stuff at the mill door, to use a posture of enchantment, when the spell was dissolved and the matron fell into his arms. The wife of the Blacksmith of Tullibody was carried up the chimney, the fairies, as they bore her off, singing-- "Deidle linkum doddie; We've gotten drucken Davie's wife, The Smith o' Tullibody." Those snatched to Fairyland might be recovered within a year and a day, but the spell for the recovery was only potent when the fairies made, on Hallow-eve, their annual procession. Sir Walter Scott relates the following:--"The wife of a Lothian farmer had been snatched by the fairies. During the year of probation, she had repeatedly appeared on Sundays in the midst of her children, combing their hair. On one of these occasions she was accosted by her husband, when she instructed him how to rescue her at the next Hallow-eve procession. The farmer conned his lesson carefully, and, on the appointed day, proceeded to a plot of furze to await the arrival of the procession. It came, but the ringing of the fairy bridles so confused him that the train passed ere he could sufficiently recover himself to use the intended spell. The unearthly laughter of the abductors, and the passionate lamentations of his wife, informed him she was lost to him for ever." A woman who had been conveyed to Fairyland was warned, by one she had formerly known as a mortal, to avoid eating or drinking with her new friends for a certain period. She obeyed; and, when the time expired, she found herself on earth, restored to the society of mankind. A matron was carried to Fairyland to nurse her new-born child, which had previously been abducted. She had not been long in her enchanted dwelling when she furtively anointed an eye with the contents of a boiling cauldron. She now discovered that what had previously seemed a gorgeous palace was, in reality, a gloomy cavern. She was dismissed; but one of the wicked wights, when she demanded her child, spat in her eye and extinguished its light for ever. About the middle of last century, a clergyman at Kirkmichael, Perthshire, whose faith was more regulated by the scepticism of philosophy than the credulity of superstition, would not be prevailed upon to yield his assent to the opinion of the times. At length, however, he felt, from experience, that he doubted what he ought to have believed. One night, as he was returning home, at a late hour, from a meeting of presbytery, and the customary dinner which followed,