TAKING AWAY COWS AND SHEEP.
A farmer had two good cows that were seized one spring with some unaccountable malady. They ate any amount of food given them, but neither grew fat nor yielded milk. They lay on their sides and could not be made to rise. An old man in the neighbourhood advised that they should be hauled up the hill, and rolled down its steepest and longest incline. The brutes, he said, were not the farmer’s cows at all, but two old men (bodaich) the Fairies had substituted for them. The farmer acted on this advice, and at the bottom of the descent, down which the cows were sent rolling, nothing was found, neither cow nor man, either dead or alive.
There are old people still living in Iona who remember a man driving a nail into a bull that had fallen over a rock, to keep away the Fairies.
A man in Ruaig, Tiree, possessed of the second sight, saw a wether sheep (molt) belonging to himself whirled through the sky, and was so satisfied the Fairies had taken it in their eddy wind, that he did not, when the animal was killed, eat any of its mutton.