An honest Hampshire farmer was sore distressed by the nightly
unsettling of his barn. However straightly, over night, he laid his
sheaves on the threshing floor, for the application of the morning’s
flail, when morning came all was topsy–turvy, higgledy–piggledy, though
the door remained locked, and there was no sign whatever of irregular
entry.
Resolved to find out who played him these mischievous pranks, Hodge
couched himself one night deeply among the sheaves, and watched for
the enemy. At length midnight arrived. The barn was illuminated as if
by moonbeams of wonderful brightness, and through the keyhole came
thousands of elves, the most diminutive that could be imagined. They
immediately began their gambols among the straw, which was soon in the
most admired disorder. Hodge wondered, but interfered not, but at last
the supernatural thieves began to busy themselves in a way still less
to his taste, for each elf set about conveying the crop away, a straw
at a time, with astonishing activity and perseverance. The keyhole was
still their port of egress and regress, and it resembled the aperture
of a beehive, on a sunny day in June. The farmer was rather annoyed at
seeing his grain vanish in this fashion, when one of the fairies, while
hard at work, said to another, in the tiniest voice that ever was heard—
“I weat; you weat?” (I sweat; do you sweat?)