[Footnote 12: I saw an extraordinary case of that, where a male came suddenly before a mated pair, asserted himself and took her to himself incontinent. There was no fighting. He stood and looked. The period of suspense was breathless but not long.]
The laws which govern the appearance of fairies to mankind or their commerce with men and women seem to be conditioned by the ability of men to perceive them. The senses of men are figuratively speaking lenses coloured or shaped by personality. How are we to know the form and pressure of the great river Enipeus, whose shape, for the love of Tyro, Poseidon took? And so the accounts of fairy appearance, of fairy shape, size, vesture, will vary in the measure of the faculty of the percipient. To me, personally, the fairies seem to go in gowns of yellow, grey, russet or green, but mostly in yellow or grey. The Oreads or Spirits of the hills vary. In winter their vesture is yellow, in summer it is ash-green. The Dryad whom I saw was in grey, the colour of the lichened oak-tree out of which she gleamed. The fairies in a Norman forest had long brown garments, very close and clinging, to the ankles. They were belted, and their hair was loose. But that is invariable. I never saw a fairy with snooded or tied up hair. They are always bare-footed. Despoina is the only fairy I ever saw in any other colour than those I have named. She always wears blue, of the colour of the shadows on a moonlight night, very beautiful. She, too, wears sandals, which they say the Satyrs weave for her as a tribute. They lay them down where she has been or is likely to be; for they never see her.
But this matter of vesture is really a digression: I have more important matter in hand, and that is to consider the intercourse between fairy and mortal, as it is governed by appearance. How does a man, for instance, gain a fairy-wife? How does a woman give herself to a fairy-lover? I have given a careful account of a case of each sort in answer. Young King gained his wife by capture; Lady Emily Rich followed her lover at a look.
But this does not really touch the point, which is, rather, how was Lady Emily Rich brought or put into such a relation with Quidnunc that she could receive a look from him? How was King put into such a relation with Mabilla that he could take her away from her own people? There must have been an incarnation, you would say; and I should agree with you. Now in Andrew King's case there was belief to go upon, the belief common to all the Cheviot side, handed down to it from untold generations and never lost; coupled with that, there was an intense and probably long-standing desire in the young man himself to realise and substantiate his belief. He had brooded over it, his fancy had gone to work upon it; he loved his Mabilla before ever he saw her; his love, it was, which evoked her. And I take it as proved--at any rate it is proved to my own satisfaction--that faith coupled with desire has power--the power of suggestion it is called--over Spirit as it certainly has over Matter. If I say, then, that Andrew King evoked Mabilla By-the-Wood, called her out of her own world into his, I assert two things: the first, that she was really at one time in her own world, the second, that she was afterward really in his. The second my own senses can vouch for. That she was fetched back by the King of the Wood and recaptured by Andrew are minor points. Grant the first taking and there is no difficulty about them.