United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Don't think I should care a fig about it," was the response. "That is not true. You told Lucy Snowe you longed to have a ride." Graham, coming in soon after, observed to his mother, "Mamma, I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities; but I should be dull without her: she amuses me a great deal more than you or Lucy Snowe."
Doctor Bulwer, in his Artificial Changeling, tells a preposterous story of Battalia's being born with two pebbles in one hand and one in the other; that he refused both the breast and the pap offered him, but ate the pebbles and continued to subsist on stones for the remainder of his life.
See note IV, p. 36. See note V, p. 37. See note VI, p. 39. See note VII, p. 43. See note VIII, p. 46. This airy monster, this half-natural changeling. Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free mechanism subject to indefinite change.
Luther gives us the following as having come to his knowledge near Halberstadt, in Saxony. A peasant had a baby, who sucked out its mother and five nurses, besides eating a great deal. Concluding that it was a changeling, the peasant sought the advice of his neighbours, who suggested that he should take it on a pilgrimage to a neighbouring shrine of the Mother of God.
Luther during his lifetime had to hear from them that his father was a Bohemian heretic, his mother a loose woman, employed at the baths, and he himself a changeling, born of his mother and the Devil. How triumphantly would they have talked about the murder or manslaughter committed by his father, had the charge admitted of proof!
If they came I'd ask them to let me go back to them, for I do so hate indoor life and civilization and refinement. And now you see the sort I am, and if you are the sort I somehow think you are, why shouldn't we be friends? Perhaps you are a changeling, too.
That was the reason why many a poor little baby, that grew puny and thin, was called a "wiseel-kind," or changeling. When the sick baby could not get well, and medicine or care seemed to do no good, the mother thought that the goblins had taken away her own child. It was only the female goblins that would change themselves into night mares and sit on the body of the dreamer.
When taxed with being a religious changeling, his shrewd answer was, "Not so, for I always keep my principle, which is this to live and to die the Vicar of Bray." Soon the famous Eton College comes into view on the northern bank of the river an institution dear to the memory of many English schoolboys.
Of course the witches had swooped down upon the lad and put the straw changeling in his place! Believe me or not, suit yourselves, but I say that there are women that know too much, and night-hags, too, and they turn everything upside down! And as for the long-haired booby, he never got back his own natural color and he died, raving mad, a few days later."
Ay, but these are MONSTERS. Let them be so: what will your drivelling, unintelligent, intractable changeling be? Shall the want of a nose, or a neck, make a monster, and put such issue out of the rank of men; the want of reason and understanding, not?
Word Of The Day