Now we heard two good stories, the first about fairy women spinning for
a mortal, the second about a wonderful changeling who was a magic
musician:--
_Fairy-Women Spinners._--'I have heard my father, Alexander MacNeil, who
was well known to Mr. [Alexander] Carmichael and to Mr. J. F. Campbell
of Islay, say that his father knew a woman in the neighbourhood who was
in a hurry to have her stock of wool spun and made into cloth, and one
night this woman secretly wished to have some women to help her. So the
following morning there appeared at her house six or seven fairy women
in long green robes, all alike chanting, "A wool-card, and a
spinning-wheel." And when they were supplied with the instruments they
were so very desirous to get, they all set to work, and by midday of
that morning the cloth was going through the process of the hand-loom.
But they were not satisfied with finishing the work the woman had set
before them, but asked for new employment. The woman had no more
spinning or weaving to be done, and began to wonder how she was to get
the women out of the house. So she went into her neighbour's house and
informed him of her position in regard to the fairy women. The old man
asked what they were saying. "They are earnestly petitioning for some
work to do, and I have no more to give them," the woman replied. "Go you
in," he said to her, "and tell them to spin the sand, and if then they
do not move from your house, go out again and yell in at the door that
Dun Borve is in fire!" The first plan had no effect, but immediately on
hearing the cry, "Dun Borve is in fire!" the fairy women disappeared
invisibly. And as they went, the woman heard the melancholy wail, "Dun
Borve is in fire! Dun Borve is in fire! And what will become of our
hammers and anvil?"--for there was a smithy in the fairy-dwelling.'
_The Tailor and the Changeling._--'There was a young wife of a young man
who lived in the township of Allasdale, and the pair had just had their
first child. One day the mother left her baby in its cradle to go out
and do some shearing, and when she returned the child was crying in a
most unusual fashion. She fed him as usual on porridge and milk, but he
wasn't satisfied with what seemed to her enough for any one of his age,
yet every suspicion escaped her attention. As it happened, at the time
there was a web of home-made cloth in the house waiting for the tailor.
The tailor came and began to work up the cloth. As the woman was going
out to her customary shearing operation, she warned the tailor if he
heard the child continually crying not to pay much attention to it,
adding she would attend to it when she came home, for she feared the
child would delay him in his work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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