In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours' by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the night: 'Up the craggy mountain And down the rushy glen, We dare not go a-hunting For fear of Little Men. Wee folk, good folk, Trooping altogether, Green jerkin, red cap, And white owl's feather.' They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with the Queen of Faery, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of _The Wee Wee Man_; while from _The Elfin Knight_ we learn that woman's wit as well as woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing-- 'A knight stands on yon high, high hill, Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw! He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill, The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,' and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark without a seam.'