In Southern Germany they believe in a species of beings somewhat like the Dwarfs, called Wild, Wood, Timber, and Moss-people. These generally live together in society, but they sometimes appear singly. They are small in stature, yet somewhat larger than the Elf, being the size of children of three years, grey and old-looking, hairy and clad in moss. The women are of a more amiable temper than the men, which last live further back in the woods; they wear green clothes faced with red, and cocked-hats. The women come to the wood-cutters and ask them for something to eat; they also take it away of themselves out of the pots; but they always make a return in some way or other, often by giving good advice. Sometimes they help people in their cooking or washing and haymaking, and they feed the cattle. They are fond of coming where people are baking, and beg of them to bake for them also a piece of dough the size of half a mill-stone, and to leave it in a certain place. They sometimes, in return, bring some of their own baking to the ploughman, which they lay in the furrow or on the plough, and they are greatly offended if it is rejected. The wood-woman sometimes comes with a broken wheel-barrow, and begs to have the wheel repaired, and she pays by the chips which turn into gold, or she gives to knitters a ball of thread which is never ended. A woman who good-naturedly gave her breast to a crying Wood-child, was rewarded by its mother by a gift of the bark on which it was lying. She broke a splinter off it and threw it into her faggot, and on reaching home she found it was pure gold. Their lives are attached, like those of the Hamadryads, to the trees, and if any one causes by friction the inner bark to loosen a Wood-woman dies. Their great enemy is the Wild-Huntsman, who driving invisibly through the air pursues and kills them. A peasant one time hearing the usual baying and cheering in a wood, would join in the cry. Next morning he found hanging at his stable-door a quarter of a green Moss-woman as his share of the game. When the woodmen are felling timber they cut three crosses in a spot of the tree that is to be hewn, and the Moss-women sit in the middle of these and so are safe from the Wild-Huntsman.[278] * * * * * The following account of the popular belief in the parts of Germany adjacent to Jutland has been given by a late writer.[279]