When Thomas returned, he informed her that the persons she had seen were the 'good wights,' who dwell in the Court of Faëry, and he brought her an invitation to accompany them thither--an invitation which he repeated with much earnestness. She answered, with true Scotch caution: 'She saw no profit to gang that kind of gates, unless she knew wherefore.'
'Seest thou not me,' he rejoined, 'worth meat and worth clothes, and good enough like in person?'
The prospect, however, could not beguile her; and she continued firm in her simple resolve to dwell with her husband and bairns, whom she had no wish to abandon. Off went Thomas in a storm of anger; but before long he recovered his temper, and resumed his visits, showing himself willing to 'fetch and carry' at her request, and always treating her with the deference due to a wife and mother. The only benefit she derived from this friendship was, she said, the means of curing diseases and recovering stolen property, so that her witchcraft was of the simplest, innocentest kind. There was no compact with the devil, and it injured nobody--except doctors and thieves. Yet for yielding to this hallucination--the product of a vivid imagination, stimulated, we suspect, by much solitary reverie--Bessie Dunlop was 'convyct and byrnt.' Mayhap, as she was led to the death-fire, she may have dreamed that she had done better to have gone with Thomas Reid to the Court of Faëry!
The combination of the fairy folklore with the gloomier inventions of witchcraft occurs again in the case of Alison Pierson (1588). There was a certain William Simpson, a great scholar and physician, and a native of Stirling. While but a child, he was taken away from his parents 'by a man of Egypt, a giant,' who led him away to Egypt with him, 'where he remained by the space of twelve years before he came home again.' On his return, he made the acquaintance of Alison, who was a near relative, and cured her of certain ailments; but soon afterwards, less fortunate in treating himself, he died. Some months had passed when, one day as Alison was lying on her bed, sick and alone, she was suddenly addressed by a man in green clothes, who told her that, if she would be faithful, he would do her good. In her first alarm, she cried for help, but no one hearing, she called upon the Divine Name, when her visitor immediately disappeared. Before long, he came to her again, attended by many men and women; and compelling her to accompany them, they set off in a gay procession to Lothian, where they found puncheons of wine, with drinking-cups, and enjoyed themselves right heartily. Thenceforward she was on the friendliest terms with the 'good neighbours,' even visiting the Fairy Queen at her court, where, according to her own account, she was made much of, was treated, indeed, as 'one of themselves,' and allowed to see them compounding wonderful healing-salves in miniature pans over tiny fires.