touched one of her eyes with an ointment of serpent’s grease, she perceived, at her return to the world, that she had acquired the faculty of seeing the dracae, when they intermingle themselves with men.  Of this power she was, however, deprived by the touch of her ghostly mistress, whom she had one day incautiously addressed.  It is a curious fact, that this story, in almost all its parts, is current in both the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, with no other variation than the substitution of Fairies for dracae, and the cavern of a hill for that of a river.[A] These water fiends are thus characterized by Heywood, in the Hierarchie—­

“Spirits, that have o’er water gouvernement, Are to mankind alike malevolent; They trouble seas, flouds, rivers, brookes, and wels, Meres, lakes, and love to enhabit watry cells; Hence noisome and pestiferous vapours raise; Besides, they men encounter divers ways.  At wreckes some present are; another sort, Ready to cramp their joints that swim for sport:  One kind of these, the Italians fatae name, Fee the French, we sybils, and the same; Others white nymphs, and those that have them seen, Night ladies some, of which Habundia queen.
   Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, p. 507.

[Footnote A:  Indeed, many of the vulgar account it extremely dangerous to touch any thing, which they may happen to find, without saining (blessing) it, the snares of the enemy being notorious and well attested.  A poor woman of Tiviotdale, having been fortunate enough, as she thought herself, to find a wooden beetle, at the very time when she needed such an implement, seized it without pronouncing the proper blessing, and, carrying it home, laid it above her bed, to be ready for employment in the morning.  At midnight, the window of her cottage opened, and a loud voice was heard, calling upon some one within, by a strange and uncouth name, which I have forgotten.  The terrified cottager ejaculated a prayer, which, we may suppose, insured her personal safety; while the enchanted implement of housewifery, tumbling from the bed-stead, departed by the window with no small noise and precipitation.  In a humorous fugitive tract, the late Dr Johnson is introduced as disputing the authenticity of an apparition, merely because the spirit assumed the shape of a tea-pot, and of a shoulder of mutton.  No doubt, a case so much in point, as that we have now quoted, would have removed his incredulity.]

The following Frisian superstition, related by Schott, in his Physica Curiosa, p. 362, on the authority of Cornelius a Kempen, coincides more accurately with the popular opinions concerning the Fairies, than even the dracae of Gervase, or the water-spirits of Thomas Heywood.—­“In the time of the emperor Lotharius, in 830,” says he, “many spectres infested Frieseland, particularly the white nymphs of the ancients, which the moderns denominate