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Just as he was leaving the room, Heriot turned and asked "You've heard of changelings?" Andrew stared. "Do you not mind hearing of goblins that get put into cradles instead of the real babies? That accounts for you. Thank the Lord, I need never again claim the discredit of begetting you!"
Only to old Cassie, the scrub-woman, who was young Cassie then, did she confide her fear. From her she received a charm compounded of goose eggshells and vinegar which Cassie claimed to be what they used in Ireland to unbewitch changelings. She kept the charm hidden for months under her pillow. It proved comforting, although absolutely ineffectual.
The shape taken by this superstition in north-western Europe is the belief in Changelings a belief which I propose to examine in the present chapter. Wise mothers take precautions against such thefts. These precautions are tolerably simple, and for the most part display the same general character.
We shall be assisted in this explanation by turning aside for a moment to examine the wild superstitions about "changelings," which contributed, along with so many others, to make the lives of our ancestors anxious and miserable. These superstitions were for the most part attempts to explain the phenomena of insanity, epilepsy, and other obscure nervous diseases.
To face the garment of rebellion With some fine colour, that may please the eye Of fickle changelings, and poor discontents, Which gape and rub the elbow at the news Of hurlyburly innovation.
Their faces looked white in the thickening dark, noses pinched and the rest beard.... Hair it was like some rapidly ripening harvest in the command, different each day, making the faces harder and harder to memorize. Mowbray had been disgusted at first faces like changelings, atrocious like chickens.
For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its names.
His lady, however, promptly restrung him; and by the time they had repacked the now clamorous changelings, and were rattling on their way to the Taylors', he began to share her outraged feelings properly, as a husband and a father should; but when he reached the Taylors' and learned from Miss Wood that at this house a child had been unwrapped whom nobody could at all identify, and that Mr. and Mrs.
Nor did the silly Mansoul stick or boggle at all at this most monstrous engagement, but, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale, they swallowed it without any chewing. Were they troubled at it? Nay, they rather bragged and boasted of their so brave fidelity to the tyrant, their pretended King, swearing that they would never be changelings, nor forsake their old Lord for a new.
Once more certain shapes and figures were born upon his canvas, but they were no longer the true children of his imagination, they were no longer his own; they were changelings, grotesque abortions. It was as if the brute in him, like some malicious witch, had stolen away the true offspring of his mind, putting in their place these deformed dwarfs, its own hideous spawn.
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