A fellow was attempting to offer violence to a young maiden. Robin came to her aid, ran between his legs in the shape of a hare, then turning himself into a horse, carried him off on his back, and flung him into a thick hedge. Robin fell in love with a weaver's pretty wife, and for her sake took service with her husband. The man caught them one day kissing, and next night he went and took Robin as he was sleeping, up out of his bed, and went to the river and threw him in. But instantly he heard behind him-- For this your service, master, I you thank. Go swim yourself; I'll stay upon the bank; and was pushed in by Robin, who had put a bag of yarn in his bed, and now went off with, _Ho, ho, hoh_! Robin went as a fiddler to a wedding. When the candles came he blew them out, and giving the men boxes in the ears he set them a-fighting. He kissed the prettiest girls, and pinched the others, till he made them scratch one another like cats. When the posset was brought forth, he turned himself into a bear, and frightening them away, had it all to himself. At length his father who we now find was king Obreon (i.e. Oberon),[329] called him up out of his bed one night, and took him to where the fairies were dancing to the music of Tom Thumb's bagpipe, and thence to Fairy-land, where he "did show him many secrets which he never did open to the world." In the same work Sib says of the woman-fairies: "To walk nightly as do the men-fairies we use not; but now and then we go together, and at good housewives' fires we warm our fairy children.[330] If we find clean water and clean towels we leave them money, either in their basins, or in their shoes; but if we find no clean water in their houses, we wash our children in their pottage, milk, or beer, or whatever we find: for the sluts that have not such things fitting, we wash their faces and hands with a gilded child's clout, or else carry them to some river and duck them over head and ears. We often use to dwell in some great hill, and from thence we do lend money to any poor man or woman that hath need; but if they bring it not again at the day appointed, we do not only punish them with pinching, but also in their goods, so that they never thrive till they have paid us." The learned and strong-minded Reginald Scot, thus notices the superstitions of his own and the preceding age.[331] "Indeed your grandams' maids were wont to set a bowl of milk before him (Incubus) and his cousin Robin Goodfellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight; and you have also heard that he would chafe exceedingly if the maid or good-wife of the house, having compassion of his nakedness, laid any clothes for him besides his mess of white bread and milk, which was his standing fee; for in that case he saith, What have we here? Hemten, hamten, Here will I never more tread nor stampen. Again:[332]