This tale was recorded from J. J. Haldane Burgess and printed by Black and Thomas in 1903. The trows had been heard several times milking the cows in the byre at Taft in Fetlar. Some of the good folk did not think the people of Taft should be cheated of their milk.
One afternoon the goodman was at Urie with butter, riding a red horse and leading a grey one with the load. At a hill called Stakkaberg he heard a voice telling him to go home, into the byre, and say that her child had fallen in the fire and was burnt. When he did, the trow in the byre threw a curiously shaped little brass pan on the doorstones, cried out that her bairn was burning and ran home. The trows were never heard milking the cows at Taft again.
The goodman took the pan into the house for luck and hung it on a nail each night with a piece of meat in it. It stayed in the family a long time, and the account breaks off at the night it was lost. The same trick of shouting that a child is in the fire to make a trow drop her goods turns up in other Shetland stories, such as the cog from Gungsta.
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