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 multitude 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 passed through this lane in the evening or late at night have heard the Piskeys laughing; but nobody, 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 grass—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,1 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!

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 hoard 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 shining.

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

‘Did she?’ cried the old woman sharply. ‘If your mother told you to help me, she had a motive for it. I know your mother’s little ways!’

‘She said you were getting up in years,’ said Nannie innocently, ‘and that the young should spare the old as much as they could.’

‘The dear little Brown Piskeys spare my old legs,’ said the old woman, looking at the child. ‘They come in and do my work before the world gets up.’

‘The Piskeys!’ cried the child. ‘Who are the Piskeys? I never heard of them before.’

‘You must be a very ignorant little girl not to have heard tell of the Piskeys,’ cried Aunt Betsy, lifting her hands in surprise. ‘They are dear Little People who take strange likes and dislikes to human beings. If they happen to like people very much, they come into their house and do their work for them. They have taken quite a fancy to me, and come into my house every night and clean up the houseplace, polish the candlesticks till they shine like gold, scour the pots and pans, and wash and clean everything that wants cleaning.’

‘How very kind of them!’ said Nannie. ‘They must be dear Little People. I do wish I could see them doing your work, Aunt Betsy. It would be something to tell father and mother when I go home.’

‘I don’t expect you will have the good fortune to see the Piskeys,’ said the old woman. ‘They are little invisible Men and Women, and nobody ever sees them unless they happen to be Piskey-eyed. As you have never heard about these dear Wee Folk till now, it is quite certain you have not the gift.’

‘Are you Piskey-eyed, Aunt Betsy?’ asked Nannie eagerly.

Her aunt did not answer, and told her little grand-niece to sit up at table and eat her breakfast.

The child was too full of the Little People to eat much breakfast, and the more she thought about them, the more anxious she became to see those dear Wee Folk, who were so very, very kind to her Aunt Betsy.

The next morning Nannie got up ever so early, with the hope of seeing the Piskeys, but, early as it was, Aunt Betsy was down before her. The work was all done, and the table laid for breakfast, as on the previous day.

‘The Piskeys came and did it long before I was up,’ remarked her aunt, not noticing the child’s face of disappointment, glancing round the big kitchen, with its stone-flagged floor, just washed, and looking as blue as the tors, and up at the dresser, with its china looking as if it had been washed in sunshine, it was so sparkling; and as for the tall brass candlesticks on the high mantelpiece, they were dazzling in their brightness.

‘It isn’t fair that the Little People should come in and do all your work when I wanted to help,’ said Nannie.

‘I am used to Piskeys, but not to children,’ returned the old woman. ‘If you really want to do something for me, you shall go out on the moors and pick me a nosegay of wild flowers. It will make the kitchen look nice, and will complete the work of the Piskeys.’

Nannie was willing, as she had nothing to do, and she put on her sun-bonnet to go.

‘The clover is in blossom,’ said her aunt, as the child was going out at the door, ‘and if you happen to find one with four leaves you may perhaps get Piskey-eyed, and if you also find a Wee’s Nest1 you will have the good fortune to see all the Little People in Cornwall!’

‘A Wee’s Nest is a thing that is never found,’ said Nannie; ‘but I’ll look for a four-leaved clover till I find it. P’raps you found a four-leaved clover, and that is how you can see the Piskeys,’ looking round at her aunt with a smile.

The old woman was not given to answering questions, and she only said that four-leaved clovers were not so easy to find as she imagined.

There was an abundance of flowers everywhere on the moors, and Nannie soon gathered a great big nosegay; but although she looked for a four-leaved clover, she could not find one.

Her aunt was very pleased with the flowers when she took them to her, and told her to put them into an earthenware pot, which she did; and when she had had her dinner, she went on the moors again. Tinker, the great tom-cat, with whom she had already made friends, followed her.

Nannie stayed out on the moors till it was almost bedtime, searching for a four-leaved clover, but she searched in vain.

The next morning, the child, hearing her aunt dressing, got up and dressed too, and, being young and nimble, she was dressed and down first.

When she got to the kitchen, she heard the clatter of pans and a tripping to and fro of tiny feet, and little bursts of laughter came from the big spence at the upper end of the kitchen; but she saw nothing living, except Tinker, cleaning his face in front of the fire, and then she heard a patter of small feet going towards the outer kitchen door, and there was silence.

‘You have driven away the Piskeys, you young good-for-nothing!’ cried Aunt Betsy, coming into the kitchen, buttoning the sleeve of her gown as she came. ‘The Little People don’t like to be spied on when they are busy working. You should not have got up so early.’

The old woman seemed as much put out as the Piskeys, and she flew round the kitchen doing the work the Small People had left undone, and would not allow Nannie to help at all, not even to lay the cloth for breakfast.

After breakfast, the child, in order to put her aunt in a better mood, went out on the moors to get another nosegay of wild flowers, and she gathered one of every sort she could find.

As she was picking them, Tinker, the cat, who had followed her again to the moors, put his paw on a clover and mewed; and, fearing a bee had stung him, she looked to see, and quite close to his paw was a white four-leaved clover!

‘I shall be able to see the Piskeys now!’ said Nannie joyfully; and she and Tinker returned to the house.

Aunt Betsy was out at the back looking for a hen who had stolen her nest, and she did not come in till dinner-time.

Nannie amused herself meanwhile in arranging the flowers, and when she had done that to her own satisfaction, she passed the four-leaved clover over her eyes three times, and looked round the kitchen to see what she could see. She saw nothing unusual, but she thought she saw a tiny brown laughing face peeping round the kitchen door.

When Aunt Betsy came in from watching the hen, the child told her she had found the four-leaved clover, thanks to Tinker.

Her aunt looked at her queerly, and asked her to show the clover which she had found; and when she saw that it was a four-leaved one, she only said: ‘But you have not yet found the Wee’s Nest, and you must not expect to see the dear little Brown Piskeys unless you do.’

Nannie hoped she would, all the same, and this hope made her so excited she could not sleep; and when daylight began to creep into the sky she got up, and without waiting to put on more than her little petticoat, she crept downstairs, holding the four-leaved clover in her hand. When she got to the door of the kitchen, leading into it from the passage, she opened it softly and peeped in; and to her delight she saw scores and scores of Little People, all as busy as bees in a field of clover. Some were sweeping the flagged stones, some were washing the cloam2 and scouring the pots and pans, some were polishing the candlesticks with a soft leather, and others were in the big spence scrubbing the stone benches and doing it all as keenly3 as Aunt Betsy herself, which was most wonderful, she thought, considering how tiny they were. For they were not much bigger than a miller’s thumb.4

It was the Little Women Piskeys who were the busiest workers. The Little Men were less industrious; and when Tinker came into the kitchen, they stopped their work of cleaning the milk-pans to pull his great bushy tail and his whiskers. One little scamp of a Piskey—perhaps unconscious that Nannie was now Piskey-eyed—put his thumb to his nose, after the manner of naughty little boys, and made a face at her.

The Piskeys were a merry little lot, and laughed at their work as if it were all play, which perhaps it was; and one little red-capped Piskey danced a hornpipe on the table as several of his companions were about to lay the cloth for Aunt Betsy’s breakfast. They stood on the edge of the table, waiting for him to finish his dance, and as he did not seem inclined to do this, they caught hold of him by his legs and tickled him.

The little Piskey who was being tickled, and those who tickled him, looked so comical that Nannie laughed, which made them stop and look round.

‘There is a little maid watching us from the door!’ said one of the Piskeys in a whisper. ‘She is Piskey-eyed, the same as Aunt Betsy, and she will be spying upon us now, sure as eggs are eggs. I think we had better forsake this house and go and do work for some other old woman.’ And, to Nannie’s distress, they went, and ever after Aunt Betsy had to do her own work, which made her so cross that she sent poor Nannie home to her parents at the first opportunity she had; and when she died, which was not a great while after, she left her little hoard of gold to strangers. Nannie’s father said ’twas a great pity, but that his wife was to blame, for if she had not urged their little maid to help the old lady to do her work with the unworthy motive of having some of her gold, Nannie would never have wanted to see the Piskeys doing Aunt Betsy’s work.

Many years ago the Piskeys used to dance on a grassy place on the top of the cliffs overlooking Newtrain Bay in the parish of Padstow. They danced there so often that the grass was worn quite bare, and until the cliffs on which they danced were undermined and broken down by the rough sea, the marks of their tiny feet were plainly seen.

An old woman who lived a short distance from Newtrain Cliffs used to tell people interested in fairies that she had often seen them dancing there. ‘They danced two and two,’ she said, ‘and so near the edge of the cliff, you would have thought they would dance over. But they never did; they were far too clever for that.’

Jinnie Chapman was the name of this old woman. She was quite a character in her way, and almost as interesting as the Small People she loved to talk about.

She was a little quick woman, with twinkling dark eyes, and whenever she went over to Newtrain to watch the Piskeys, she wore a black cottage-bonnet over her neat jinnie-guick cap, a blue print apron, and a quaint little black turnover with a wide border of red cones. This turnover she called a ‘q’ shawl, because the cones on its border were the shape of q’s, she said.

It was the great pleasure of her dull, uneventful life to see the Piskeys dancing, which she was simple enough to believe they did to give her pleasure; and she embraced every opportunity to get to the Newtrain Cliffs to watch them.

Jinnie had watched the Small People so often that she knew every one of them by sight, and how many there were that danced.

They never took any notice of the little old woman in the cottage-bonnet, the quaint shawl, and blue print apron, watching them dancing near a low stone hedge green and gold with samphire; and they laughed and talked to each other just the same as if she were not present.

They never danced, as far as Jinnie knew, except when the moon was high, and they left off dancing when the moon set like a ball of fire over the great headlands. But she did not know where they went after the moon had gone down.

One very bright moonlight night in the early autumn, when the Piskey-stools1 were thick on Newtrain Cliffs, old Jinnie came again to watch the Piskeys; and when she got there, there were not any to be seen. She could not understand it, and she went and looked at the Piskey-stools to see if they were sitting on any of them having a chat, which they sometimes did when they were tired of dancing; but every Piskey-stool on the cliffs was unoccupied.

As she was wondering what had become of the Piskeys, she heard shrieks of tiny laughter, like the giggles of kittiwakes, coming up from Newtrain Bay under the cliffs; and she hastened down the steep road leading to the bay—which was romantic-looking, and almost shut in by tall cliffs—as fast as her old legs would take her.

When she got to the bottom of the road, she met four little Piskeys coming up, carrying a large Piskey-bag between them; and being very anxious to know what they were going to do with the dark-brown thing, she said:

‘My little dears, will you kindly tell me what you are going to do with the Piskey-bag?’

They were evidently too surprised to answer the old woman at once, for she had never spoken to them before, and they stared up at her open-mouthed.

‘To sleep in when the cold weather comes,’ answered a Piskey at last.

‘They are ever so comfortable to snuggle under when the snow is on the ground,’ said another little Piskey.

‘Sleep in them, do you?’ cried old Jinnie, greatly interested. ‘To think of it now! I expect they are as warm as the blanketing the blanket-weavers weave in their looms at Padstow. But I never knew before you slept in the bags; I thought you kept your money in them.’

‘We don’t, then,’ cried the Piskeys, grinning all over their little elf faces, which were almost as brown as the Piskey-bag they were carrying. ‘We use the tiny young bags to keep our money in, not big ones like this.’

‘Up we go!’ cried one of the Piskeys to his companions, giving the one nearest him a poke in his ribs; and the four little Brown Men began to ascend the steep road, carrying the Piskey-bag by its four tails, swinging it to and fro, and shrieking with laughter as they swung it.

Jinnie watched them for a few minutes, and then went down to the pebbly beach, where she saw dozens of little Brown Men in companies of four, each company bearing a Piskey-bag between them.

There was a long string of these Little People from the water’s edge to where she met them, which was about a dozen yards from the foot of the steep road.

The little Brown Men took no notice of her, and swung the bags just as did the first quartette, seemingly unconscious that she was watching them, and laughed and joked among themselves as they swung them.

Old Jinnie followed them up the beach and road, and she wondered to herself where they were going to take the bags; but she never knew, for when they reached the top of the cliff where they danced, they vanished, Piskey-bags and all!

A young married woman, who was very pretty, lived with her husband in a sweet little cottage by the sea. The cottage was cob-walled, and had a small flower-garden in its front, which was a picture in the early springtime with periwinkles and gilliflowers, and in the summer-time with roses and hollyhocks. There was another garden belonging to the cottage, but it was only for vegetables, and was on the top of a cliff quite five minutes’ walk from the cottage.

This young wife and her husband, who was a waggoner, had one little child a few months old. The child was very dear to them both, and they thought she was the sweetest and most beautiful little baby in all the world. The fairies must have been quite of the same opinion, as you will see.

One afternoon the young wife was about to make an Irish stew for her husband’s supper, when she found she had not enough potatoes in the house to make it.

As she took her sun-bonnet from its peg to go up to the cliff garden to dig some up, her baby, who was lying in its wooden cradle, puckered its fair little face and began to cry.

‘I believe the darling knows I am going out,’ cried the fond young mother. ‘I can’t leave her here all by her little self; I must take her with me.’ And when she had put on her bonnet and a basket for the potatoes on her arm, she lifted the baby out of the cradle and took her with her to the cliff, fondling the dear little thing and talking to it as she went.

When she had reached the cliff-garden, she stood on the edge of the cliff with her flaxen-haired babe in her arms, looking out over the sea. It was a lovely June day, and the water was as quiet as a mill-pond and blue as vipers’ bugloss, she told her baby. ‘Just the sort of weather for my pretty to be out in,’ she cried, hugging the child.

Mrs. Davies, as the young woman was called, after gazing out over the sea for a few minutes, laid her baby down on the top of a potato ridge, close to where a succory and a knapweed grew side by side, and interlaced their blue and purple blossoms. When the babe had fixed its eyes upon the flowers and cooed to them in baby fashion, she set to work to dig up the potatoes.

She had not been digging very long when she heard a curious noise behind her, like the sound of soft wind in trees, but there were no trees in the cliff-garden, and not wind enough to move even the potato leaves.

She dropped the biddix1 to see what it was that made so strange a sound, and as she dropped it she was caught in a whirlwind—a Fairy Whirlwind, she said it was—which whirled her round and round like a whirligig; and as she whirled she was enveloped in a cloud of fine grey pillum, or dust, and she could not see anything beyond her nose.

When the whirlwind went away—and it vanished as suddenly as it came—she found herself close to the edge of the cliff ever so far away from her baby.

Fearing she knew not what for her child, she ran over to it to see if it was quite safe; and to her horror, there, where her own fair little baby had lain, she saw a dark, wizen little creature, with a face wrinkled all over like an old woman’s!

‘That is not my little maid,’ she shrieked; ‘it’s a changeling! The wicked Little People envied us our little beauty, and have stolen her away, and left one of their own ugly brats in her place. They raised a Fairy Whirlwind to hide from me what they were doing, the wicked, wicked little things!’

Mrs. Davies never knew how long she stood staring down in hopeless misery upon the ugly babe the Small People had left there on the potato ridge in place of her own; but in the end she took it up in her arms and carried it down to the cottage.

Her husband was at home by this time, wondering what had become of his wife and child, and you might have knocked him down with a straw when she poured out her woe to him, and showed him the ugly dark babe the fairies had exchanged for their own beautiful babe.

‘What must I do with it?’ she asked piteously, when her husband turned away from it with grief in his eyes and sorrow in his heart.

‘Keep it till the Small People are tired of our little handsome,’ he said, ‘and be good to it if you can. If we ain’t kind to the fairies’ cheeld, they won’t be kind to ours, that’s certain.’

So the young woman and her husband, for the sake of their own flaxen-haired, blue-eyed little darling the Small People had envied and taken away, were very kind to the babe they had left in its place. They hoped, as they took care of it, although they never loved it, that the fairies would quickly grow tired of their child and bring her back; but they hoped in vain.

A year after the Small People had raised a whirlwind, the fairies’ cheeld, as Mrs. Davies and her husband called the babe left on the potato ridge in place of their own, pined away and died; but the little human child with its flaxen curls and eyes of Cornish blue was never seen by mortal eyes after the fairies had stolen it.