We met the first of the Barra witnesses on the top of a rocky hill, where the road from Castlebay passes. He was carrying on his back a sack of sand heavy enough for a college athlete, and he an old man between seventy and eighty years of age. Michael Buchanan has known John MacNeil all his life, for they were boys together on the island; and there is not much difference between them in age, our interpreter being the younger. Then the three of us sat down on a grassy knoll, all the world like a fairy knoll, though it was not; and when pipes were lit and the weather had been discussed, there was introduced the subject of the 'good people'--all in Gaelic, for our witness now about to testify knows no English--and what John MacNeil said is thus interpreted by Michael Buchanan:-- _A Fairy's Visit._--'Yes, I have' (in answer to a question if he had heard of people being _taken_ by the 'good people' or fairies). 'A fairy woman visited the house of a young wife here in Barra, and the young wife had her baby on her breast at the time. The first words uttered by the fairy woman were, "Heavy is your child;" and the wife answered, "Light is everybody who lives the longest." "Were it not that you have answered my question," said the fairy woman, "and understood my meaning, you should have been less your child." And then the fairy woman departed.' _Fairy-Singing._--'My mother, and two other women well known here in Barra, went to a hill one day to look after their sheep, and, a thick fog coming on, they had to rest awhile. They then sat down upon a knoll and began to sing a _walking_ (cloth-working) song, as follows:--"It is early to-day that I have risen;" and, as they sang, a fairy woman in the rocks responded to their song with one of her own.' _Nature of Fairies._--Then the question was asked if fairies were men or spirits, and this is the reply:--'I never saw any myself, and so cannot tell, but they must be spirits from all that the old people tell about them, or else how could they appear and disappear so suddenly? The old people said they didn't know if fairies were flesh and blood, or spirits. They saw them as men of more diminutive stature than our race. I heard my father say that fairies used to come and speak to natural people, and then vanish while one was looking at them. Fairy women used to go into houses and talk and then vanish. The general belief was that the fairies were spirits who could make themselves seen or not seen at will. And when they _took_ people they _took_ body and soul together.' THE TESTIMONY OF JOHN CAMPBELL, NINETY-FOUR YEARS OLD