The story of a young woman who grows thin and pale. She wants the green mist that signals spring to rise over the fields, believing it will restore her, but it doesn’t come. She expresses a desire to live like the cowslips that grow by the gate every year, and to die with the first of them when summer arrives, and her mother tells her to be quiet in case the bogles overhear her. The next morning, the green mist comes, and soon the girl grows strong again. She flirts with a young man, who picks a cowslip for her, and the next morning she dies, wrinkled and white.

It is not uncommon for people to appear to recover from some illnesses before succumbing to them, and it is possible this story was an explanation for this phenomenon. It was recounted by Marie Clothilde Balfour in her three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’, published in Folklore (1891). Balfour lived in Redbourne while collecting the tales, though it is not clear precisely where she was when she heard this. She writes that the story was told to her by a man who said he had heard it from his great grandfather, who swore it was true.

Maureen James provides a full version in modern English, with fidelity to the original source, in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and a précis here. There is a full version in Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue, Folktales of England (1965), and an abridged version in Katharine M. Briggs, Folk Tales of Britain (1970). Adrian Gray includes a good version in Tales of Old Lincolnshire (1990). Alan Garner has a version in Book of Goblins (1969), and Kevin Crossley-Holland in The Old Stories (1997). Marcia Sewall adapted and illustrated the story for children, and this was published by Houghton Mifflin in the USA in 1999.