North Cornwall Fairies and LegendsTregarthen, Enys
Science
North Cornwall Fairies and Legends
Tregarthen, Enys
Folklore -- England -- Cornwall (County); Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
'We've got him!' they cried to each other, and they said it with such
gusto and with such a comical expression on their tiny brown faces,
that Jan, bewildered as he was, and tired with going round the common
so many times, could not help laughing, they looked so very funny,
particularly when the Little Women winked up at him from under their
little scarlet hoods.
The Piskeys--for they were Piskeys--hurried him down the common,
dancing round him all the time; and when he got there he felt so
mizzy-mazey with those tiny whirling figures going round and round him
like a whirligig, that he did not know whether he was standing on his
head or his heels. He was also in a bath of perspiration--'sweating
leaking,' he expressed it--and, putting his hand in his pocket
to take out a handkerchief to mop his face, he remembered having
been told that, if ever he got Piskey-laden, he must turn his coat
pockets inside out, when he would be free at once from his Piskey
tormentors. He immediately acted on this suggestion, and in a minute
or less his coat-pockets were hanging out, and all the Little Men
and the Little Women had vanished, and there, right in front of him,
he saw his own gate! He lost no time in opening it, and in a very
short time was in his thatched cottage on the cliff.
THE SMALL PEOPLE'S FAIR
In the same parish where Jan Brewer was Piskey-laden on Constantine
Common there is a beautiful lane called Tresallyn. It has high mossy
hedges, where ferns grow in abundance, and where speedwells love to
display their multitude of blue blossoms.
This lane is said to be a regular Piskeys' haunt, where all the Wee
Folk in the neighbourhood meet. People who have passed through this
lane in the evening or late at night have heard the Piskeys laughing;
but nobody, as far as we know, except one young fellow, ever had the
good fortune to see them, and he, like Jan Brewer, had the gift of
seeing what others could not.
Hender Bennett was the name of this young fellow, and he lived at a
farm near Tresallyn Lane. One night, after he had been over to Towan,
a village about a mile and a half away, to see a young girl whom he
was courting, he was returning home through this beautiful old lane,
when he was startled by a burst of music quite close to him. The
music was so sweet and yet so stirring that he wanted to dance to
the tune. He looked about to see whence the sound was coming, but he
could see nothing unusual.
It was a glorious night, and the big moon floated like a silver ball
in the cloudless blue of the midnight sky, and shone so brightly that
he could even see fronds of the ferns standing out quite clearly from
the mossy hedge-banks.
As he was looking around, the music grew louder, sweeter, and more
stirring, and sending his gaze down the lane to where the trees arched
it, he saw a big crowd of Small People holding a fair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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