But, in spite of Protestantism, school-boards, and education committees,
'pisky-pows' are still placed on the ridge-tiles of West Cornish
cottages, to propitiate the piskies and give them a dancing-place, lest
they should turn the milk sour, and St. Just and Morvah folk are still
'pisky-led' on the Gump (_an Ûn Gumpas_, the Level Down, between Chûn
Castle and Carn Kenidjack), and more rarely St. Columb and Roche folk on
Goss Moor. It will not do to say that it is only another form of
'whisky-led'. That is an evidently modern explanation, invented since
the substitution of strange Scottish and Irish drinks for the good
'Nantes' and wholesome 'Plymouth' of old time, and it does not fit in
with the phenomena. It was only last winter, in a cottage not a hundred
yards from where I am writing, that milk was set at night for piskies,
who had been knocking on walls and generally making nuisances of
themselves. Apparently the piskies only drank the 'astral' part of the
milk (whatever that may be) and then the neighbouring cats drank what
was left, and it disagreed with them. I cannot vouch for the truth of
the part about the piskies and the 'astral' milk--I give it as it was
told to me by the occupant of the cottage, who was not unacquainted with
'occult' terminology--but I do know that the milk was consumed, and that
the cats, one of which was my own, were with one accord unwell all over
the place. But for the present purpose it does not matter whether these
things really happened or not. The point is that people thought they
happened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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