"Woe to the upland swain, who, wandering far, The circle treads, beneath the evening star! His feet the witch-grass green impels to run, Full on the dark descent, he strives to shun; Till, on the giddy brink, o'erpower'd by charms, The Fairies clasp him, in unhallow'd arms, Doom'd, with the crew of restless foot, to stray The earth by night, the nether realms by day; Till seven long years their dangerous circuit run, And call the wretch to view this upper sun."[324:A] Pregnant and child-bed women were considered, as in Germany, peculiarly in danger of being stolen by the Fairies at noon-day, and various preventive charms were adopted against this abstraction. "The Tramontains to this day," says Kirk, speaking of "Women yet alive, who tell they were taken away when in Child-bed to nurse Fairie Children," "put bread, the Bible, or a piece of Iron, in Women's Bed when travelling, to save them from being thus stolen."[324:B] Of the capture and subjection of those who had been devoted by execration, several instances are related both by Scotch and English writers[324:C]; but the most general mode of abstraction practised by the Elvish race, was that of stealing or exchanging children, and so commonly was this species of theft apprehended in the Highlands of Scotland, that it was customary to watch children until the christening was over[324:D], under the idea, that the power of the Fairies, owing to the original corruption of human nature, was chiefly to be dreaded in the interval between birth and baptism. The Beings substituted for the healthy offspring of man were apparently idiots, monstrous and decrepid in their form, and defective in speech; and when the Fairies failed to purloin or exchange the infant, in consequence of the vigilance of its parents, it was usually found _breath-blasted_, "their unearthly breath making it wither away in every limb and lineament, like a blighted ear of corn, saving the countenance, which unchangeably retains the sacred stamp of divinity."[325:A] The cause assigned for this evil propensity on the part of the Fairies, was the dreadful obligation they were under, of sacrificing the tenth individual to the Devil every, or every seventh year; "the teind of them," says the indictment of Alison Pearson, "are tane to hell everie year[325:B]," while the hero of the Ballad entitled The Young Tamlane, exclaims:— "And pleasant is the Fairy land; But, an eiry tale to tell! Ay, at the end o' seven years, We pay the teind to hell."[325:C]