DEFINITION OF A FAIRY
FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited
the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted
to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalist
to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near
Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining
with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so
affected that his account of it was incoherent. In the year 1807 a troop of
fairies visited a wood near Aix and carried off the daughter of a peasant, who
had been seen to enter it with a bundle of clothing. The son of a wealthy
bourgeois disappeared about the same time, but afterward returned. He had seen
the abduction been in pursuit of the fairies. Justinian Gaux, a writer of the
fourteenth century, avers that so great is the fairies' power of transformation
that he saw one change itself into two opposing armies and fight a battle with
great slaughter, and that the next day, after it had resumed its original shape
and gone away, there were seven hundred bodies of the slain which the villagers
had to bury. He does not say if any of the wounded recovered. In the time of
Henry III, of England, a law was made which prescribed the death penalty for
"Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge" a fairy, and it was universally respected.
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