that place. Among these we find the following. One morning at sunrise, while he was tying his garter with one foot against a low dyke, he was startled by feeling something like a rope of straw passed between his legs, and himself borne swiftly away upon it to a small brook at the foot of the southernmost hill of Eildon. Hearing a hoarse smothered laugh, he perceived he was in the power of witches or sprites; and when he came to a ford called the Brig-o’-stanes, feeling his foot touch a large stone, he exclaimed, “I’ the name o’ the Lord, ye’se get me no farther!” At that moment the rope broke, the air rang as with the laughter of a thousand voices; and as he kept his footing on the stone he heard a muttered cry, “Ah, we’ve lost the coof!”
This adventure reminds us how the ancestor of the Duffus family was spirited away from his paternal fields, and found the next day at Paris, in the royal cellars, with a silver cup in his hand. In that case, however, the victim provoked his destiny by echoing the cry of “Horse and hattock,” the elfin signal for mounting and riding off.
world. See on this Die Saga von Polyphem, by W. Grimm, Berlin, 1857. He quotes:
“1. Homer’s story of Polyphemus. “2. A story of French origin in Dolopathes, written between 1184-1212. “3. A story told by the Oghuzi, a Tatar-Turkish race, in Diez’s Des Neuentdeckte oghuzische Cyklop veglichcn mit dem kanerischen, 1815. “4. The third adventure of Sinbad. “5. A Serb tale. “6. A Roumanian tale, collected in Transylvania by Obert. “7. An Esthonian tale. “8. A Finn tale. “9. A tale picked up by Castrin, the ethnologist of the northern tribes of Russia, in Karelia. “10. A Folk-tale in the Harz Mountains. “11. A Norse tale in Asbjörnsen.“The preservation of the knife and the mound called the Giant’s Grave show that the myth I heard is not of recent origin at Dalton. I am told by one of our servants from Dalton that at the rebuilding of the farm the mound was opened and a stone coffin found in it; but whether this be a kistvaen or a mediæval sarcophagus I cannot tell. I wrote some time ago to my successor at Dalton for another version of the Giant story to compare it with mine, and about the stone coffin, but have had no answer.”
