have acquired from them the new art. Of that we know nothing. But I think we do know enough to say that there did exist, in England and generally in the British Isles, in Scandinavia and in Germany, a blacksmithying people, not of Iberian nor of Aryan blood, not found in large numbers nor forming big colonies, but vagrant and dispersed as are the Gipsies of the present day. And I suspect that it is this people who have occasioned the stories told of pixies, kobolds, brownies, elves, etc. Such a people, shy, living a different life from, those for whom they worked, were sure to excite imagination and give rise to fantastic stories. They were feared as well as respected. They do not seem ever to have been ill-treated; they were too valuable to be molested. Indeed, as already instanced, they entered occasionally into marriage relations with the settled inhabitants. The family of Alversleben, in the north of Germany, takes its name from an ancestor who spent much of his time with the elves under a green mound.
But if there were workers in iron and makers of steel blades, there must have been also miners, who not only used such iron as was found in sand and morass, but who tracked it in veins in the rock. I do not think
