The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

forest and that he must die in three days, which he did. This is the "inconvenience of their succubi" original: súcubos; female demons or spirits thought to have sexual intercourse with men in their sleep lamented by Mr. Kirk. Thus, it seems that most of these opinions are not local nor merely Celtic, but are worldwide in their scope and spread.

Sir Walter Scott observes, for example, the following regarding the Afghans and the inhabitants of the Highlands: "Their superstitions are the same, or nearly so. The Gholée Beabacan (demons of the desert) resemble the Boddach A spectral old man or bogeyman in Scottish Gaelic folklore of the Highlanders, 'who walk the moor at midnight and at noon'" (Quarterly Review, xiv. 289). Furthermore, Mr. Kirk says that "the true bodies of werewolves and witches are wounded at home (by the union of the spirit of Nature which runs everywhere, echoing and doubling the blow toward the other) when their astral or assumed bodies are wounded elsewhere." Thus, if a witch-hare is shot, the real body of the witch is wounded in the same part; similarly, Lafitau, in North America, discovered that when a hunter shot a witch-bird, the actual sorcerer was wounded in the same spot. The theory that fairies appear as "a small, rough dog" is illustrated by the Welsh hounds of hell. Blackwood's Magazine of 1818 contains many examples of these hell-hounds, which are often wrapped in a cloak of fire, just as Rink says is the case among the Eskimos. Let us take a modern example. The following sentence repeats due to an original printing error. Mr. Kirk says that hell-hounds are a type of hell-hound seen wrapped in a cloak of fire, as Rink says is the case among the Eskimos. Let us take a modern example: "F.A. Paley and a friend, walking home at night along a lonely road, see a large black dog rise up from it, walk slowly to one side, and disappear. They search in vain. Mr. Paley later learns that this mysterious dog is the terror of the neighborhood, but no real dog is known." Date: summer of 1837 (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, February 1893, p. 31).

The dwellings of these aerial shadows of humanity are, naturally, the "fairy hills." One such hill exists, the fairy hill in Aberfoyle, where Mr. Kirk resided: Baillie Nicol Jarvie describes its legends in an admirable passage from Rob Roy. Mr. MacRitchie says: "It remains to be discovered how much of this 'mound' is artificial, or if any of it is." It is much larger than most artificial mounds. According to Mr. Kirk, the Highlanders "superstitiously believe that the souls of their predecessors dwelt" in the fairy hills. "And for that purpose, they say, a 'mote' or mound was dedicated next to every churchyard to receive the souls until their adjacent bodies rose, thus becoming a fairy hill." On this point, the Highland philosophers have put the cart before the horse. The burial mounds are much older than the churches, which were undoubtedly built next to them because the site already possessed a sacred character. Two very good examples can be seen at Dalry, on the Ken in Galloway, and at Parton, on Loch Ken.

The grassy slopes are large and symmetrical, and modern Presbyterian churches occupy ancient sites; in Parton, there are ruins of the old Catholic church. Around the mound of Dalry—according to the local version of the Märchen German: a folk or fairy tale of Hesione—a great dragon used to coil itself in three folds before being killed by the blacksmith. No one, perhaps, can consider these mounds, and many others like them, as anything other than sepulchral relating to a tomb or burial. On the road between Ballantrae in Ayrshire and Stranraer, there is a beautiful mound overlooking the sea, which immediately recalls the mound over the sea that Elpenor, in the Odyssey, asked Odysseus to build for him: "the monument to an unfortunate man." In the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, the ghost of a hero fallen at Troy appears to the adventurers on a mound just like this one on the Ayrshire coast. Speaking of these mounds, Mr. Kirk tells how, during a famine in 1676, two women had a vision of a treasure hidden in a fairy hill. They excavated it and discovered some coins of "good money." It is said that the great gold breastplate in the British Museum was found in Wales, where tradition spoke of a ghost in golden armor that haunted a mound. The mound was excavated and the gold breastplate—much like the Shakespearean bricks—is "alive to bear witness" to the truth of the story.