[450] "The goats are supposed to be upon a very good understanding with the fairies, and possessed of more cunning and knowledge than their appearance bespeaks."--_Stewart_: see _Wales_. [451] See above, p. 305. [452] There is a similar legend in Scandinavia. As a smith was at work in his forge late one evening, he heard great wailing out on the road, and by the light of the red-hot iron that he was hammering, he saw a woman whom a Troll was driving along, bawling at her "A little more! a little more!" He ran out, put the red-hot iron between them, and thus delivered her from the power of the Troll (see p. 108). He led her into his house and that night she was delivered of twins. In the morning he waited on her husband, who he supposed must be in great affliction at the loss of his wife. But to his surprise he saw there, in bed, a woman the very image of her he had saved from the Troll. Knowing at once what she must be, he raised an axe he had in his hand, and cleft her skull. The matter was soon explained to the satisfaction of the husband, who gladly received his real wife and her twins.--Thiele, i. 88. _Oral._ [453] Told, without naming his authority, by the late W. S. Rose, in the Quarterly Review for 1825. ISLE OF MAN. Mona once hid from those that search the main, Where thousand elfin shapes abide. COLLINS. The Isle of Man, peopled by Celts, and early and frequently visited and colonised by the Northmen, has also its Fairies, which differ little from those of the greater islands between which it lies. An English gentleman, named Waldron, who resided in the island in the early part of the last century, was curious about its Fairy-lore, and he has recorded a number of the legends which he heard.[454] His book, indeed, has been the chief source whence Ritson, Sir Walter Scott,[455] and others, have drawn their illustrations of English Fairy-lore in general, and the subsequent inquiries of Mr. Train have enabled him to add but very little to it. We will here relate some of these legends: The great peculiarity of the Manks Fairies, according to Mr. Waldron, is their fondness for riding, and this not on little steeds of their own, or on the small breed of the country, but on the large English and Irish horses, which are brought over and kept by the gentry. Nothing, it was said, was more common than to find in the morning horses covered with foam and sweat, and tired to death, which had been shut up at night in the stable. One gentleman assured Mr. Waldron that three or four of his best horses had been killed with these nocturnal exercises.