" Under Nicholas's hands Kaviak was forced to relinquish not only the baby hare, but his own elf locks.

The shrines are certainly less magnificent than those fairy bowers of the elf-land St. Roch, but there is a good deal of beaded peltry and bark-work about them, giving them, in a small way, the character of aboriginal bazaars.

And yet the Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions.

It may be that the Gael's conception of humanised spirits may not have been uninfluenced by the traditions of that earlier diminutive race whose arrow-heads of flint were so long regarded as "elf-bolts."

" A Goa-Nisse is an elf-king, and corresponds to the English Puck or Robin Goodfellow.

Only 'tis well we be not at home, or there might be elf knots in the horses' manes to-night.

According to a Netherlandish belief, the elf-leaf, or sorceresses' plant, is particularly grateful to them, and therefore ought not to be plucked.

The little whirlwinds of the gulches seized the leaves and danced with her too, the birches and aspens tossed their hands, and rising ever higher and wilder and more elf-like came the mocking cadences of her laughter.

" In Sweden the miliary fever is said by the peasantry to be caused by the elf-mote or meeting with elves, as a remedy for which the lichen aphosus or lichen caninus is sought.

And one evening, that I ever remember, as we wandered in the park-lands, she began to sayhalf unthinkingthat it was truly an elves-night.

On rare nights, in the places where no grass grows between the shrubs, and the sand silvers whitely to the moon, one sees them whisking to and fro on innumerable errands of seed gathering, but the chief witnesses of their presence near the spring are the elf owls.

These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world, and all the vaporous freshness of dawn.

"Some of you," said her majesty, "must kill cankers in the musk-rose-buds, and some wage war with the bats for their leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, come not near me: but first sing me to sleep."

The first of these is the string of Latin songs in which the would-be elves comment on their nefarious proceedings in Jocastus' orchard.

It was after watching her covertly for sometime that Katie set down, a little elf dancing in her eye, yet something of the seer in that very eye in which the elf danced: "Of course you have heard me tell of Ann, the girl to whom I was so devoted in Italy.