Invisible the fairy came.
Your precious babe is hence conveyed,
And in its place a changeling laid.
Where are the father's mouth and nose,
The mother's eyes as black as sloes?
See here, a shocking awkward creature,
That speaks a fool in every feature."

GAY.

"He is an ugly ill-favoured boy--just like Riquet a la Houppe."

"That he is! Do you not know that he is a changeling?"

Such were the words of two little girls walking home from a school
for young ladies kept, at the Cathedral city of Winchester, by two
Frenchwomen of quality, refugees from the persecutions preluding the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who enlivened the studies of
their pupils with the Contes de Commere L'Oie.

The first speaker was Anne Jacobina Woodford, who had recently come
with her mother, the widow of a brave naval officer, to live with
her uncle, the Prebendary then in residence. The other was Lucy
Archfield, daughter to a knight, whose home was a few miles from
Portchester, Dr. Woodford's parish on the southern coast of
Hampshire.

In the seventeenth century, when roads were mere ditches often
impassable, and country-houses frequently became entirely isolated
in the winter, it was usual with the wealthier county families to