On the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge, Or, an Illustration of the Advantages Which Would Result from a More General Disseminatio

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of a night. A certain being called a fairy, though supposed to be at least two or three feet high, is believed to have the faculty of contracting its body, so as to pass through the key-hole of a door; and though they are a distinct species of beings from man, they have a strong fancy for children; and hence, in the Highlands of Scotland, new-born infants are watched till the christening is over, lest they should be stolen or exchanged by those fantastic existences. The regions of the air have been peopled with apparitions and terrific phantoms of different kinds, which stalk abroad at the dead hour of night, to terrify the lonely traveller. In ruined castles and old houses, they are said to announce their appearance by a variety of loud and dreadful noises; sometimes rattling in the old hall like a coach and six, and rumbling up and down the staircase like the trundling of bowls or cannon balls. Especially in lonely church-yards, in retired caverns, in deep forests and dells, horrid sounds are said to have been heard, and monstrous shapes to have appeared, by which whole villages have been thrown into consternation. That many of the superstitious opinions and practices above alluded to, still prevail even within the limits of the British empire, appears from the following extract from tho Monthly Magazine for July 1813, p. 490. In Staffordshire, they burn a calf in a farm house alive, to prevent tin- other calves from dying. In the same county, a woman having kept a toad in a pot in her garden, her hnsbaml killed it, and she reproached him for it, saying, she intended the next Sunday to have taken the sacrament, for the purpose of getting some of the bread to feed him with, and make him thereby a valuable familiar spirit to her. At Long Ashton, a young farmer has sever...