Let us now return to Woodhall Spa; and on the way pause for a moment on the moor. We have already mentioned a curious character, by name Dawson, but more commonly called “Tab-shag,” who, within the memory of the writer and many more, lived as a kind of squatter, in his sod-built hut, close to “The Tower.” A sort of living fossil was this individual, short in stature, dark in complexion, and with a piercing, almost uncanny, eye; roughly clad, and looking as though he were something of a stranger to soap and water. “What’s in a name?” said love-sick Juliet. Yet the name which clung to this eccentric person probably had its significance. In one of the “Magic Songs” of the Finns (given in “Folklore,” vol. i., No. iii., p. 827) a sort of demon is described as “Old Shaggy,” “the horror of the land,” “reared on a heather clump,” “living on the lee side of a stone,” corresponding much to the home and haunts of our Tab-shag. Brogden {113} says “Shag-foal” means “a hobgoblin supposed to haunt certain places,” and a writer in the “Archæological Review” (for January, 1890) says that “Shag” is an old term for an elf, or Brownie, or “goblin dwarf.” He adds, “The Hog-boy, or Howe-boy, of the Orkneys, in Lincolnshire is pronounced Shag-boy.” An old lady, born at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is quoted, in “The Cornhill Magazine” (August, 1882) as saying she had often heard of fairies and shag boys, but had never seen one herself, “though lasses were often skeart (_i.e._, scared, frightened) at them.” And the weird-looking figure of Tab-shag, living in the peculiar way he did, in a kind of “brock,” or “how,” of his own construction, was not altogether unlike that of one of the “How folk,” the “little people,” believed in by our superstitious forefathers, and whose memory is perpetuated in the Folk’s glove (digitalis) of our heath; as he squatted on his “faerie-knowe” on the lee side of the old Tower, or roamed over the dreary moor at nightfall to startle the belated wayfarer. What may have been the meaning of the other element in his soubriquet is not so easy to say. There is a Cornish (and probably British) word “Tab,” which means turf (“Archæol. Journ.” vol. ii., No. 3, p. 199), and that would suit this dweller on the heath; but it is more likely that “Tab” had a reference to the cat, “Tabby” being the term for a brindled cat. And Bishop Harsnet, in his curious book on “The Superstitions of the Day” (1605), says a witch, or elf, “can take the form of hare, mouse, or cat.” Tabby is really a corruption of Tibby, and that is from Tybalt, the name of puss in the old Beast Epic of the middle ages. Ben Johnson uses “tiberts” for cats; and Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (Act. iii., sc. 1) addresses Tybalt, when wishing to annoy him, as “Tybalt, you rat catcher . . . King of cats” (Folk-etymology).