But it would be impossible, without very largely extending our limits, to give other than a meagre sketch of this interesting portion of folk lore. All our ancient poets and writers of fancy, Scotish and English, dealt largely with the subject, and quarried from this exhaustless mine. "Spenser was contented with the fairies of romance, but Shakespeare founded his elfin world on the frothiest of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flowers of his own exuberant fancy. How much is the invention of the great poet we shall probably never be informed, and his successors have not rendered the subject more clear by adopting the graceful world he has created, as though it had been interwoven with the popular mythology and formed a part of it."[3] With the spread of education and increase of knowledge, the superstitious belief in fairies has almost died out, except in some very few localities and among very uneducated people. When the writer was a very young boy, he was acquainted with an old couple who related to him their having jointly and severally seen the "good people" in troops enter, in procession, the Castlehill of Inverugie; and the husband, a worthy, honest man, with the strongest declarations of verity, described his having spent part of a summer eve lying, with his ear on the turf, listening to the delighful music which was executed by the fairy minstrels within the mount. That such things have been is still believed by many, and there are still those who assert that their appearance and mischievous exploits have ceased, or, at least, become less frequent, since the light of the Gospel was diffused in its purity, or that they have fled before the minister and the schoolmaster. THE GUIDMAN O' INGLISMILL.