Page:Shetland Folk-Lore - Spence - 1899.pdf/174

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Folk-Lore

milk for her child. As she entered the byre, she beheld a trow milking her cow. She stood spell-bound, unable to speak or move. Presently the trowie wife exclaimed:

Himpie, hornie, hoy,
Minnie kum carl mi mug.”

Or according to another version:

"O, when an' döl, da bairn is faaen
I' da fire an' brunt."

The woman now had power to “sain hersel',” and the trow went like lightning out the byre lum, dropping the kit as she went.

An old man named Henry Farquhar or Forker is asleep on a bench in the corner of the butt-end. In the small hours of the morning he is awakened by the glimmer of a weird light. He sees a trow enter carrying a new-born child. In her hand she holds a tiny jar of peculiar workmanship. He tries to “sain himsel',” but

is powerless. But on the bauk sit two

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