It is on Fridays that the fairies have the most power to work evil;
therefore Friday is an unlucky day to begin work, or to go on a
journey, or to have a wedding; for the spirits are then present
everywhere, and hear and see everything that is going on, and will mar
and spoil all they can, just out of malice and jealousy of the mortal
race.
It is then they strike cattle with their elfin arrows, lame a horse,
steal the milk, and carry off the handsome children, leaving an ugly
changeling in exchange, who is soon known to be a fairy sprite by its
voracious appetite, without any natural increase in growth.
This superstition makes the peasant-women often very cruel towards
weakly children; and the trial by fire is sometimes resorted to in
order to test the nature of the child who is suspected of being a
changeling. For this purpose a fairy woman is usually sent for, who
makes a drink for the little patient of certain herbs of whose power
she alone has the secret knowledge; and a childless woman is considered
the best to make the potion. Should there be no improvement in the
child after the treatment with herbs, then the witch-women sometimes
resort to terrible measures to test the fairy nature of the sufferer.
A child who was suspected of being a changeling, because he was
wasted and thin and always restless and fretful, was ordered by the
witch-woman to be placed for three nights on a shovel outside the door
from sunset to sunrise, during which time he was given foxglove to
chew, and cold water was flung over him to banish the fire-devil. The
screams of the child at night were frightful, calling on his mother
to come and take him in; but the fairy doctor told the mother not to
fear; the fairies were certainly tormenting him, but by the third
night their power would cease, and the child would be quite restored.
However, on the third night the poor little child lay dead.