North Cornwall Fairies and Legends Part 13

HOW JAN BREWER WAS PISKEY-LADEN

The moon was near her setting as a tall, broad-shouldered man called Jan Brewer was walking home to Constantine Bay to his cottage on the edge of a cliff.

He was singing an old song to himself as he went along, and he sang till he drew near the ruins of Constantine Church, standing on a sandy common near the bay. As he grew near the remains of this ancient church, which were clearly seen in the moons.h.i.+ne, he thought he heard someone laughing, but he was not quite sure, for the sea was roaring on the beach below the common, and the waves were making a loud noise as they dashed up the great headland of Trevose.

'I was mistaken; 'twas n.o.body laughing,' said Jan to himself, and he walked on again, singing as before; and he sang till he came near a gate, which opened into a field leading to his cottage, but when he got there he could not see the gate or the gateway.

'I was so taken up with singing the old song, that I must have missed my way,' he said again to himself. 'I'll go back to the head of the common and start afresh,' which he did; and when he got to the place where his gate ought to have been, he could not find it to save his life.

'I must be clean mazed,' [23] he cried. 'I have never got out of my reckoning before, nor missed finding my way to our gate, even when the night has been as dark as pitch. It isn't at all dark to-night; I can see Trevose Head'--looking across the bay--'and yet I can't see my own little gate! But I en't a-going to be done; I'll go round and round this common till I do find my gate.'

And round and round the common he went, but find his gate he could not.

Every time he pa.s.sed the ruins of the church a laugh came up from the pool below the ruins, and once he thought he saw a dancing light on the edge of the pool, where a lot of reeds and rushes were growing.

'The Little Man in the Lantern is about to-night,' he said to himself, as he glanced at the pool. 'But I never knew he was given to laughing before.'

Once more he went round the common, and when he had pa.s.sed the ruins he heard giggling and laughing, this time quite close to him; and looking down on the gra.s.s, he saw to his astonishment hundreds of Little Men and Little Women with tiny lights in their hands, which they were flinking [24] about as they laughed and giggled.

The Little Men wore stocking-caps, the colour of ripe briar berries, and gra.s.s-green coats, and the Little Women had on old grandmother cloaks of the same vivid hue as the Wee Men's coats, and they also wore fascinating little scarlet hoods.

'I believe the great big chap sees us,' said one of the Little Men, catching sight of Jan's astonished face. 'He must be Piskey-eyed, and we did not know it.'

'Is he really?' cried one of the d.i.n.ky [25] Women. ''Tis a pity,' as the Little Man nodded. 'But we'll have our game over him all the same.'

'That we will,' cried all the Little Men and Little Women in one voice; and, forming a ring round the great tall fellow, they began to dance round him, laughing, giggling, tehoing, and flas.h.i.+ng up their lights as they danced.

They went round him so fast that poor Jan was quite bewildered, and whichever way he looked there were these Little Men and Little Women giggling up into his bearded face. And when he tried to break through their ring they went before him and behind him, making a game over him, he said!

He was at their mercy and they knew it; and when they saw the great fellow's misery, they only laughed and giggled the more.

'We've got him!' they cried to each other, and they said it with such gusto and with such a comical expression on their tiny brown faces, that Jan, bewildered as he was, and tired with going round the common so many times, could not help laughing, they looked so very funny, particularly when the Little Women winked up at him from under their little scarlet hoods.

The Piskeys--for they were Piskeys--hurried him down the common, dancing round him all the time; and when he got there he felt so mizzy-mazey with those tiny whirling figures going round and round him like a whirligig, that he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his heels. He was also in a bath of perspiration--'sweating leaking,' he expressed it--and, putting his hand in his pocket to take out a handkerchief to mop his face, he remembered having been told that, if ever he got Piskey-laden, he must turn his coat pockets inside out, when he would be free at once from his Piskey tormentors. He immediately acted on this suggestion, and in a minute or less his coat-pockets were hanging out, and all the Little Men and the Little Women had vanished, and there, right in front of him, he saw his own gate! He lost no time in opening it, and in a very short time was in his thatched cottage on the cliff.

THE SMALL PEOPLE'S FAIR

In the same parish where Jan Brewer was Piskey-laden on Constantine Common there is a beautiful lane called Tresallyn. It has high mossy hedges, where ferns grow in abundance, and where speedwells love to display their mult.i.tude of blue blossoms.

This lane is said to be a regular Piskeys' haunt, where all the Wee Folk in the neighbourhood meet. People who have pa.s.sed through this lane in the evening or late at night have heard the Piskeys laughing; but n.o.body, as far as we know, except one young fellow, ever had the good fortune to see them, and he, like Jan Brewer, had the gift of seeing what others could not.

Hender Bennett was the name of this young fellow, and he lived at a farm near Tresallyn Lane. One night, after he had been over to Towan, a village about a mile and a half away, to see a young girl whom he was courting, he was returning home through this beautiful old lane, when he was startled by a burst of music quite close to him. The music was so sweet and yet so stirring that he wanted to dance to the tune. He looked about to see whence the sound was coming, but he could see nothing unusual.

It was a glorious night, and the big moon floated like a silver ball in the cloudless blue of the midnight sky, and shone so brightly that he could even see fronds of the ferns standing out quite clearly from the mossy hedge-banks.

As he was looking around, the music grew louder, sweeter, and more stirring, and sending his gaze down the lane to where the trees arched it, he saw a big crowd of Small People holding a fair.

He had heard of Little People's fairs from his great-grannie, but had never hoped to see one, and he was as glad as a bird that he happened to be going down Tresallyn Lane when they were holding one.

The Wee Folk were holding their fair near a gate about a dozen yards or so from where he was standing. As the moon was just then floating over the gate, he could see all the Little People quite plainly, and what they were doing.

The Little Men and the Little Women were all dressed up to the nines in the way of clothes, and although he could not have described the cut of their coats or the style of their gowns, he knew that all the Little Women were lovely, that dear little faces peeped out of quaint bonnets, that they carried frails in their hands, and that Piskey-purses hung by their sides in the same way that his great-grannie's big cotton purse bag hung under her gown.

There were ever so many little standings or stalls on the gra.s.s--one here and one there, like currants in his mother's buns, Hender told himself. Every standing was laid out with all sorts of tempting things pleasing to Small People, on which they gazed with evident delight. They asked the price of this thing and that of the little standing women behind the stalls; and to see the Little People opening their tiny brown Piskey-purses and taking out their fairy money to pay for their purchases was as good as a play.

But what delighted the young fellow most were the Tiny Fiddlers and Pipers; and to watch the way the Fiddlers elbowed their fiddle-sticks and fiddled was worth walking twelve miles any night to see, he said, to say nothing of watching the Little Men and the Little Women dancing to the tunes the Fiddlers fiddled and the Pipers piped. It was merrymaking with a vengeance, he told himself, and the fiddling, the piping, and the merrymaking at Summercourt Fair were nothing to it!

The fair itself was held a few feet away from the standings and the merrymaking, and when Hender could turn away his gaze for a few minutes to look at the Little People's Fair Park, he saw a sight he feared he should never see again. There were scores of fairy horses, and as many bullocks and cows, and flocks of sheep and goats, none of them much bigger than those quaint little animals in toy farmyards; but these were all alive, he could tell, by the prancing of the horses! The sheep were confined within hurdles. There were pigs there as well, only to Hender's eyes they looked exactly like very large sow-pigs, [26] all of which were in small stone enclosures. Moving about among the animals were Little Men who were dressed like farmers, but whether they were farmers or not he could not tell.

It was all so wonderfully interesting to Hender that he stood still like one in a dream, till one of the Little Men in a smart green coat went over to a very pretty Little Lady, who reminded him of his own sweetheart whom he had not very long kissed good-night, and asked her if he might treat her to some fairing, and he took hold of her little hand and led her up to the standing. And when he opened his purse to pay for what he bought for his lady-love Hender had to give vent to his feelings, and he cried out: 'I could not have done it better--no, not even if I had bought a fairing for my own little sweetheart! No fy! I couldn't.'

The words were no sooner spoken when the Small People's fair vanished, Little People and all, and the only thing left to show that a fair had been held were a dozen sow-pigs in a stone enclosure!

THE PISKEYS WHO DID AUNT BETSY'S WORK

In our great-great-grandmothers' days people very seldom went away visiting, and when little Nannie Sando received an invitation from her Aunt Betsy--great-aunt really--who lived quite twenty miles from her home on a lonely moor, near Liskard, there was great excitement in Nannie's home.

Nannie's father did not like the thought of her going away so far from home, and her mother did not like it either, but she said Aunt Betsy was well-to-do, and had a stockingful of gold hidden away somewhere; it would not do for them to offend her by refusing to let the child go. So the invitation was accepted, and Nannie was sent off by coach, and met by her aunt in a donkey-cart in Horn Lane, at Liskard, where the coach put up; and that same evening she reached the little house on the moor.

It was quite a nice little house, with two rooms up and two down, and a large garden behind, sheltered by granite boulders fantastically piled one on top of the other. In front of the house were the moors, which, at the time Nannie came to stay with her aunt, were gorgeous with the bloom of heather and other flowers.

Nice as the house was, and beautiful as the moors were, with their background of Kilmar and other Cornish tors, it was a lonely spot for a child to come and stay at, with only an elderly woman for company. But, then, there was the charm of novelty, and there were delights in the shape of her aunt's donkey and cow, and a big black tom-cat called Tinker, to say nothing of the far-stretching moors, which were so beautiful to look at and run wild on.

When Nannie was leaving to go and stay with Aunt Betsy, her mother, with a view to possessing some of the old lady's golden h.o.a.rd some day, told her little daughter to be very attentive to her aunt. 'Get up when she does,' she said, 'and help her to do her work, and make yourself very useful;' and the child said she would.

Nannie, when she was going to bed on the evening of her arrival, remembered her mother's injunction, and said to her aunt:

'Please call me when you get up; I want to help you to clean up the houseplace.'

But the old woman did not call her grand-niece, and let her stay in bed till breakfast-time; and when the child came down she found all the work done, and everything clean and s.h.i.+ning.

'You never called me, Aunt Betsy,' said Nannie reproachfully. 'Mother did so want me to help you.'