At Offensen on the Aller in Lower Saxony, lived a great farmer, whose name was Hövermann. He had a boat on the river; and one day two little people came to him and asked him to put them over the water. They went twice over the Aller to a great tract of land that is called the Allerô,[270] which is an uncultivated plain extending so wide and far that one can hardly see over it. When the farmer had crossed the second time one of the Dwarfs said to him, "Will you have now a sum of money or so much a head?" "I'd rather have a sum of money," said the farmer. One of them took off his hat and put it on the farmer's head, and said, "You'd have done better to have taken so much a head." The farmer, who had as yet seen nothing and whose boat had gone as if there was nothing in it, now beheld the whole Allerô swarming (_krimmeln un wimmeln_) with little men. These were the Dwarfs that he had brought over. From that time forward the Hövermanns had the greatest plenty of money, but they are all now dead and gone, and the place is sold. But when was this? Oh! in the old time when the Dwarfs were in the world, but now there's no more of them, thirty or forty years ago.[271] _The Dwarfs' Borrowing Bread._ Albert Steffel, aged seventy years, who died in the year 1680, and Hans Kohmann, aged thirty-six, who died in 1679, two honest, veracious men, frequently declared that as one time Kohmann's grandfather was working in his ground which lay in the neighbourhood of the place called the Dwarfs' hole, and his wife had brought out to the field to him for his breakfast some fresh baked bread, and had laid it, tied up in a napkin, at the end of the field, there came up soon after a little Dwarf-woman, who spoke to him about his bread, saying, that her own was in the oven, and that her children were hungry and could not wait for it, but that if he would give her his, she would be certain to replace it by noon. The man consented, and at noon she returned, spread out a very white little cloth, and laid on it a smoking hot loaf, and with many thanks and entreaties told him he might eat the bread without any apprehension, and that she would return for the cloth. He did as she desired, and when she returned she told him that there had been so many forges erected that she was quite annoyed, and would be obliged to depart and abandon her favourite dwelling. She also said that the shocking cursing and swearing of the people drove her away, as also the profanation of Sunday, as the country people, instead of going to church, used to go look at their fields, which was altogether sinful.[272] _The Changeling._ It was the belief, in some parts of Germany, that if a child that was not thriving were taken to a place named Cyriac's Mead, near Neuhausen, and left lying there and given to drink out of Cyriac's Well, at the end of nine days it would either die or recover.