Explore "Elf Trap" by Francis Stevens on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IN THIS our well-advertised, modern world, crammed with engines, death-dealing shells, life-dealing serums, and science, he who listens to "old wives' tales" is counted idle. He who believes them, a superstitious fool. Yet there are some legends which have a strange, deathless habit of recrudescence in many languages and lands.
Of one such I have a story to tell. It was related to me by a well-known specialist in nervous diseases, not as an instance of the possible truth behind fable, but as a curious case in which--I quote his words--"the delusions of a diseased brain were reflected by a second and otherwise sound mentality."