The neat, but homely cottage, and all who were in it, seemed all on a sudden to undergo a mighty transformation; some for the better, some for the worse. The new-made mother appeared as a beautiful lady attired in white; the babe was seen wrapped in swaddling clothes of a silvery gauze. It looked much prettier than before, but still maintained the elfish cast of the eye, like his father, whilst two or three children more had undergone a strange metamorphosis. For there sat on either side the bed's head, a couple of little flat-nosed imps, who with "mops and mows," and with many a grimace and grin, were busied to no end in scratching their own polls, or in pulling the fairy lady's ears with their long and hairy paws. The dame who beheld all this, fearing she knew not what, in the house of enchantment, got away as fast as she could, without saying one word about _striking_ her own eye with the magic ointment and what she had seen. The sour-looking old fellow once more handed her up on the coal-black-horse, and sent her home in a _whip sissa_[348] much faster than she came. On the next market-day, when she sallied forth to sell her eggs, she saw the same old fellow busy pilfering sundry articles from stall to stall, and going up to him she enquired about his wife and child. "What!" exclaimed he, "do you see me to-day?" "See you! to be sure I do, as plain as I see the sun in the sky; and I see you are busy, too." "Do you?" says he, "and pray with which eye do you see all this?" "With the right eye to be sure." "The ointment! the ointment!" cried he. "Take that, for meddling with what did not belong to you; you shall see me no more." He struck her eye as he spoke, and from that hour till the day of her death she was blind of that eye. _Pixy-Vengeance._