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It is not however the mothers only, who need protection from the Nereids, but the children also, and that too throughout their childhood; yet not against the same perils; for the mother is liable to malicious injuries; the child is safe indeed from wilful hurt, but it may be stolen by Nereids. We have already seen how Nereids who have wed with mortal men, though faithless to their husbands, are yet drawn home now and again by love of their children. And such of them too as have never yielded to human embrace are yet instinct with a strange yearning to possess a mortal woman’s prettiest little ones; on one child they exert a fascination which unhappily proves fatal to it; another they seize with open violence; or again they set stealthily in some cradle a babe of pure Nereid birth—a changeling that by some weird fatality is weakly and doomed to die—and carry off to the woods and hills the human infant, in whom they delight, to be their playmate and their fosterling. In a history of the island of Pholegandros, the writer, a native of the place, accounts for the multitude of small chapels in the island on the ground of the peasants’ anxiety each to have a saint close to his property to defend him from such raids by Nereids and other kindred beings[326].