of names; and in order to find room for more the Devil had to pull it with his teeth, so as to stretch it further. In so doing he bumped his head against the wall, and made a wry face: whereat she, who saw it, laughed. When they got home her husband pulled out the piece of wood which his father had put into the hole; and the same instant his wife was gone. The husband was disconsolate, but he saw her no more. It was said, however, that she often appeared to his two children in secret, and brought them precious gifts. In Smaland a parallel legend is current, according to which the ancestress of a certain family was an elf-maid who came into the house with the sunbeams through a knot-hole in the wall, and, after being married to the son and bearing him four children, vanished the same way as she had come. In North Germany it is believed that when seven boys, or seven girls, are born in succession, one among them is a nightmare. A man who had unknowingly wedded such a nightmare found that she disappeared from his bed at nights; and on watching her he discovered that she slipped through the hole for the strap by which the latch was lifted, returning the same way. So he stopped up the opening, and thus always retained her. After a considerable time he wanted to use the latch, and thinking she had forgotten her bad habit and he might safely take the peg out, he did so; but the next night she was missing, and never came back, though every Sunday morning the man found clean linen laid out for him as usual.[1]
A Pomeranian tradition relates the adventure of an officer who was much troubled by the nightmare. He caught her in the usual manner and wedded her, although he could not persuade her to say whence she came. After some years she induced her husband to open the holes he
- ↑ Jannsen, vol. i. p. 53; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 70, quoting Afzelius, vol. ii. p. 29, quoting Müllenhoff. It is a common Teutonic belief that knot-holes are attributable to elves (Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 461).
