CAST. Then we have really dwindled in our growth, and Adam was really a hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches high, and Eve a hundred and eighteen feet nine inches and three quarters, as we are solemnly informed by our profane chronicles? Nay, even the story may be true of the Pict, who bit off the end of the mattock, with which some slave of science was opening his coffin, and thundered forth this exclamation: “I see the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger.” IDA. If Evelyn were here, he would ask why we have no skeletons of giants as of lizards in our secondary rocks; and he would tell this learned Theban, Castaly, that Cuvier decided these fossils, which seemed to be the _débris_ of a giant race, to be the bones of elephants. The legends of Athenæus are probably a fable, and the fossils of the pigmies were, I dare say, the petrified skeletons of “span-long, wee unchristen’d bairns.” Your allusion to the brownies, reminds me of the monstrous errors which have crept into our legends from the mingling of _two stories_, or the warping of plain facts in natural history. And indeed I interrupt you to recount, in proof of this, some fragments from “Surtees’ Durham.” “Every castle, tower, or manor-house has its visionary inhabitants. ‘The Cauld Lad of Hilton’ belongs to a very common and numerous class, the brownie or domestic spirit, and seems to have possessed no very distinctive attributes. He was seldom seen, but was heard nightly by the servants _who slept in the great hall_. If the kitchen had been left in perfect order, they heard him amusing himself by breaking plates and dishes, hurling the pewter in all directions, and throwing every thing into confusion. If, on the contrary, the apartment had been left in disarray, (a practice which the servants found it most prudent to adopt,) the indefatigable goblin arranged every thing with the greatest precision. This poor _esprit folet_, whose pranks were at all times perfectly harmless, was at length banished from his haunts by the usual expedient of presenting him with a suit of clothes. A green cloak and hood were laid before the kitchen fire, and the domestics sat up watching at a prudent distance. At twelve o’clock the spirit glided gently in, stood by the glowing embers, and surveyed the garments provided for him very attentively, tried them on, and seemed delighted with his appearance, frisking about for some time, and cutting several summersets and gambados, till on hearing the first cock, he twitched his mantle tight about him and disappeared with the usual valediction: “‘Here’s a cloak, and here’s a hood, The cauld lad of Hilton will do no more good.’”