Sometimes the reflex anticipates the action of the reality: “was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days.” It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics.[4] The end of the Co-walker is obscure. “This Copy, Echo, or living Picture goes att last to his own Herd.” Thus Ghosts are short-lived, and, according to M. d’Assier on the Manners of Posthumous Man (_L’Homme Posthume_), seldom survive for more than a century. By an airy being of this kind the Highlanders explained the false or morbid appetite. A “joint-eater” inhabited the patient; “he feeds two when he eats.” As a rule, the Fairies get their food as witches do—take “the Pith and Milk from their Neighbours’ Cows unto their own chiese-hold, throw a Hair-tedder, at a great distance, by Airt Magic, only drawing a spigot fastened in a Post, which will bring Milk as farr as a Bull will be heard to roar.” This is illustrated in the drinking scene in _Faust_. This kind of charge is familiar in trials for witchcraft. In accordance with the whole metaphysics of the system of doubles, which are parasites on humanity, is the superstition of nurses stolen by Fairies, and of children kidnapped while changelings are left in their place. The latter accounts for sudden decline and loss of health by a child; he is not the original child, but a Fairy brat. To guard against this, bread (as human food hateful to Fairies—so the Kanekas carry a boiled yam about at night), or the Bible, or iron is placed in the bed of childbirth. “Iron scares spirits,” as the scholiast says of the drawn sword of Odysseus in Hades. The Fairy bride, in Wales, vanishes on being touched with iron. This belief probably came in when iron was a new, rare, and mysterious metal. The mortal nurses in Fairyland are pleasantly illustrated by the ballad “I heard a cow lowe, A bonny, bonny cow lowe,”