The Urisk, like the Brownie of England, had great simplicity of character, and many tricks were played upon it in consequence. A farmer in Strathglass got it to undergo a painful operation that it might become fat and sleek like the farmer’s own geldings. The weather at the time being frosty, it made a considerable outcry for some time after. From its haunting lonely places, other appearances must often have been confounded with it. In Strathfillan (commonly called simply the Straths, _Strathaibh_), in the Highlands of Perthshire, not many years ago a number of boys saw what was popularly said to be an Urisk. In the hill, when the sun was setting, something like a human being was seen sitting on the top of a large boulder-stone, and growing bigger and bigger till they fled. There is no difficulty in connecting the appearance with the circumstance that some sheep disappeared that year unaccountably from the hill, and a quantity of grain from the barn of the farm. In the Hebrides there is very little mention of the Urisk at all. In Tiree the only trace of it is in the name of a hollow, _Slochd an Aoirisg_, through which the public road passes near the south shore. The belief that it assisted the farmer was not common anywhere, and all over the Highlands the word ordinarily conveys no other idea than that which has been well-defined as “a being supposed to haunt lonely and sequestered places, as mountain rivers and waterfalls.” THE BLUE MEN (_Na Fir Ghorm_). The fallen angels were driven out of Paradise in three divisions, one became the Fairies on the land, one the Blue Men in the sea, and one the Nimble Men (_Fir Chlis_), _i.e._ the Northern Streamers, or Merry Dancers, in the sky. This explanation belongs to the North Hebrides, and was heard by the writer in Skye. In Argyllshire the Blue Men are unknown, and there is no mention of the Merry Dancers being congeners of the Fairies. The person from whom the information was got was very positive he had himself seen one of the Blue Men. A blue-coloured man, with a long grey face (_aodunn fada glas_), and floating from the waist out of the water, followed the boat in which he was for a long time, and was occasionally so near that the observer might have put his hand upon him.