Manx Phynnoderee, who, when the farmer complained of his not cutting the grass sufficiently close to the ground, left the grumbler to cut it himself next year, but went after him stubbing up the roots so fast as almost to cut off the man’s legs. The Phynnoderee liked clothing as little as the Brownie, and once, when rewarded for special service by the present of a few articles of dress, he lifted them up one by one exclaming,—
“Cap for the head! alas, poor head!
Coat for the back! alas, poor back!”
and so on, till, with a melancholy wail, he departed, never to return. Both sprites, like Milton’s “drudging goblin,” delighted in the “cream-bowl duly set,” but the Brownie at least would have resented the charge of labouring to “earn” it. Sir Walter Scott relates how the last Brownie in Ettrick Forest, the Brownie of Bodsbeck, vanished when the mistress of the house placed a porringer of milk and a piece of money in his haunts. He was heard to howl, and cry all night, “Farewell bonnie Bodsbeck!” and in the morning disappeared for ever.[1] The Ettrick Shepherd has given the title of the “Brownie of Bodsbeck” to a tale, in which an exiled Cameronian assumes the character of this mysterious being, and thereby gains shelter and support.
If the Scottish homesteads have their attendant sprites, the wild moorlands are not without their mysterious denizens. In a letter from Mr. Surtees to Sir W. Scott, given in the memoir prefixed to vol. iv. of Surtees’s History of Durham, we read, on the authority of an old dame named Elizabeth Cockburn, how in the year before the Great Rebellion two young men from Newcastle were sporting on the high moors above Elsdon, and at last sat down to refresh themselves in a green glen near a mountain stream. The younger lad went to drink at the brook, and raising his head again saw the “Brown man of the Muirs,” a dwarf very strong and stoutly built, his dress brown like withered bracken, his head covered with frizzled red hair, his countenance ferocious, and his eyes glowing like those of a bull. After some parley, in which the stranger reproved the hunter for trespassing on his demesnes and slaying the creatures who were
- ↑ Border Minstrelsy, vol. i. p. 205.
