much.  On another occasion this frank penitent confesses her presence at a rendezvous of witches, Lammas, 1659, where, after they had rambled through the country in different shapes—­of cats, hares, and the like—­eating, drinking, and wasting the goods of their neighbours into whose houses they could penetrate, they at length came to the dounie Hills, where the mountain opened to receive them, and they entered a fair big room, as bright as day.  At the entrance ramped and roared the large fairy bulls, which always alarmed Isobel Gowdie.  These animals are probably the water-bulls, famous both in Scottish and Irish tradition, which are not supposed to be themselves altogether canny or safe to have concern with.  In their caverns the fairies manufactured those elf-arrow heads with which the witches and they wrought so much evil.  The elves and the arch-fiend laboured jointly at this task, the former forming and sharpening the dart from the rough flint, and the latter perfecting and finishing (or, as it is called, dighting) it.  Then came the sport of the meeting.  The witches bestrode either corn-straws, bean-stalks, or rushes, and calling, “Horse and Hattock, in the Devil’s name!” which is the elfin signal for mounting, they flew wherever they listed.  If the little whirlwind which accompanies their transportation passed any mortal who neglected to bless himself, all such fell under the witches’ power, and they acquired the right of shooting at him.  The penitent prisoner gives the names of many whom she and her sisters had so slain, the death for which she was most sorry being that of William Brown, in the Milntown of Mains.  A shaft was also aimed at the Reverend Harrie Forbes, a minister who was present at the examination of Isobel, the confessing party.  The arrow fell short, and the witch would have taken aim again, but her master forbade her, saying the reverend gentleman’s life was not subject to their power.  To this strange and very particular confession we shall have occasion to recur when witchcraft is the more immediate subject.  What is above narrated marks the manner in which the belief in that crime was blended with the fairy superstition.

To proceed to more modern instances of persons supposed to have fallen under the power of the fairy race, we must not forget the Reverend Robert Kirke, minister of the Gospel, the first translator of the Psalms into Gaelic verse.  He was, in the end of the seventeenth century, successively minister of the Highland parishes of Balquidder and Aberfoyle, lying in the most romantic district of Perthshire, and within the Highland line.  These beautiful and wild regions, comprehending so many lakes, rocks, sequestered valleys, and dim copsewoods, are not even yet quite abandoned by the fairies, who have resolutely maintained secure footing in a region so well suited for their residence.  Indeed, so much was this the case formerly, that Mr. Kirke, while in his latter charge of Aberfoyle, found materials