Jock Mulldroch

A fellow who lived at Craigwaggie, Galloway, once, perhaps about 150 years ago. Tradition says that he laid eggs, ay eggs, larger than goose eggs, and strangely spreckled black and yellow; he used to cackle too after he laid them, which was on a truff laft amang a wheen breckans; sometimes he was called Craigwaggie's meikle chuckie; once a fortnight he is said to have produced an egg, and his mother, after having sold a few of them as bonny goose eggs, she set a couple of them beneath a braw tappend hen to clock. Long and dreich did the favourite chucky of Lucky Mulldroch sit on them before they were hatched; at length they chipped, and out came two little lads clad in green, and under the gudewife's care they thrave, and were well known long over the south of Scot land by the title of the Birlies. Willie and Wattie Birly were well liked by every body; they were something in the nature of brownies, or rather mangrell fairies. They va nished away though, and after the year forty, the year of the lang storm, they never were heard of; some think they sank in a snaw wride, and afterwards into a Qua.

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