man at Corwrion had twins, and she complained one day to the witch, who lived close by, at Tyddyn y Barcut, that the children were not getting on, but that they were always crying day and night. Are you sure that they are your children?' asked the witch, adding that it did not seem to her that they were like hers. 'I have my doubts also,' said the mother. 'I wonder if somebody has changed children with you,' said the witch. I do not know,' said the mother. But why do you not seek to know?' asked the other. But how am I to go about it?' said the mother. The witch replied, 'Go and do something rather strange before their eyes and watch what they will say to one another.' 'Well, I do not know what I should do,' said the mother. 'Oh,' said the other, 'take an egg-shell, and proceed to brew beer in it in a chamber aside, and come here to tell me what the children will say about it.' She went home and did as the witch had directed her, when the two children lifted their heads out of the cradle to see what she was doing, to watch, and to listen. Then one observed to the other, I remember seeing an oak having an acorn,' to which the other replied,' And I remember seeing a hen having an egg;' and one of the two added, ' But I do not remember before seeing anybody brew beer into the shell of a hen's egg.' The mother then went to the witch and told her what the twins had said one to the other; and she directed her to go to a small wooden bridge, not far off, with one of the strange children under each arm, and there to drop them from the bridge into the river beneath. The mother went back home again and did as she had been directed. When she reached home this time, to her astonishment she found that her own children had been brought back."

Next comes a story about a midwife who lived at Corwrion. "One of the fairies came to ask her to come and attend on his wife. Off she went with him, and she was astonished to be taken into a splendid palace. There she con

tinued to go night and morning to dress the baby for some time, until one day the husband asked her to rub her eyes with a certain ointment he offered her. She did so, and found herself sitting on a tuft of rushes, and not in a palace. There was no baby and all had disappeared. Some time afterwards she happened to go to the town, and whom should she there see busily buying various wares, but the fairy on whose wife she had been attending. She addressed him with the question, 'How are you, to-day?' Instead of answering her, he asked, 'How do you see me?' 'With my eyes,' was the prompt reply. Which eye?' he asked. 'This one,' said the woman, pointing to it; and instantly he disappeared, never more to be seen by her." This tale is incomplete, but it can be made up from another version I have seen in print somewhere, though I cannot now lay my hand on it. It was possibly in Mr. Sikes' book.

"One day Guto, the farmer of Corwrion, complained to his wife that he was in need of men to mow his hay, and she answered, 'Why fret about it? look yonder! There you have a field full of them at it, and stripped to their shirt sleeves (yn llewys eu crysau). When he went to the spot the sham workmen of the Fairy Family had disappeared. This same Guto, or somebody else, happened, another time, to be ploughing, when he heard some person he could not see calling out to him, 'I have got the bins (that is the vice) of my plough broken.' 'Bring it to me,' said the driver of Guto's team, 'that I may mend it.' When they brought the furrow to its end, there they found the broken vice, with a barrel of beer placed near it. One of the men sat down and mended it. Then they made another furrow, and when they returned to the spot they found there a two-eared dish, filled to the brim with bara a chwrw, or bread and beer." The vice, I may observe, is an English term, which is applied in Carnarvonshire to a certain part of the plough; it is otherwise called bins,

but neither does that seem to be a Welsh word, nor have I heard either used in South Wales.

At times the wife of one of the Fairies was in the habit of coming out of the lake of Corwrion with her spinning-wheel (troell bach) on fine summer days, and betaking herself to spinning. While at that work she might be heard constantly singing or humming, in a sort of round tune, the words sili frit. So that "Sili ffrit Leisa Bèla" may now be heard from the mouths of the children in that neighbourhood. But I have not been successful in finding out what Liza Bella's "silly frit" exactly means, though I am, on the whole, inclined to think the words are other than of Welsh origin: the last of them, ffrit, is usually applied in Cardiganshire to anything worthless or insignificant, and the derivative, ffrityn, means one who has no go or perseverance in him; the feminine is friten. In Carnarvonshire my wife has heard frityn and ffritan applied to a small man and a small woman respectively. Mr. Hughes says that in Merioneth and parts of Powys sìli frit is a term applied to a small woman or a female dwarf who happens to be proud, vain, and fond of the attentions of the other sex (benyw fach, neu goraches falch a hunanol a fyddai hoff o garu); but he thinks he has heard it made use of with regard to the Gipsies, and possibly also to the Tylwyth Teg. The Rev. O. Davies thinks the words "sili ffrit Leisa Bèla" to be very modern, and that they refer to a young woman who lived at a place in the neighbourhood, called Bryn Bèla, or Brymbèla, Bella's Hill, who was ahead, in her time, of all the girls in those parts in matters of taste and fashion. This however does not seem to go far enough back, and it is possible still, that in Bèla (that is, in English spelling, Bella) we have merely a shortening of some such a name as Isabella or Arabella, which were once much more popular in the Principality than they are now; in fact, I do not feel sure that Leisa Bèla is not bodily a corruption of Isabella. As to

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sili frit, one might at first have been inclined to render it by small fry, especially in the sense of the French "de la friture" as applied to young men and boys, and to connect it with the Welsh sil and silod, which mean small fish; but the pronunciation of sili being that of the English word silly, it appears, on the whole, to belong to the host of English words to be found in colloquial Welsh, though they seldom get into books. Students of English philology ought to be able to tell us whether frit had the meaning here suggested in any part of England, and how lately; also, whether there was such a phrase as "silly frit" in use. After penning this, I received the following interesting communication from Mr. William Jones of Llangollen :-The term sìli ffrit was in use at Beddgelert, and what was thereby meant was a child of the Tylwyth Teg. It is still used for any creature that is smaller than ordinary. "Pooh, a silly frit like that!" (Pw, rhyw sili ffrit fel yna !). "Mrs. So-and-so has a fine child." "Hah, do you call a silly frit like that a fine child?" (Mae gan hon a hon blentyn braf. Ho, a ydych chwi yn galw rhyw sili ffrit fel hwna yn braf?) But to return to Leisa Bèla and Belene, it may be that the same person was meant by both these names, but I am in no hurry to identify them, as none of my correspondents knows the latter except Mr. Hughes, who gives it on the authority of Gutyn Peris, the bard, and nothing further so far as I can understand, whereas Bèla will come before us in another story, as it is the same name, I presume, which Glasynys has spelled Bella in "Cymru Fu".

These tales are brought into connection with the present day in more ways than one, for besides the various accounts of the buganod or bogies of Corwrion frightening people when out late at night, Mr. D. E. Davies knows a man, who is still living, and who well remembers the time when the sound of working used to be heard in the lake, and the

voices of children crying there somewhere in its depths, but that when people rushed there to see what the matter was, all was found profoundly quiet and still. Moreover, there is a family or two, now numerously represented in the parishes of Llandegai and Llanllechid, who used to be taunted with being the offspring of fairy ancestors. One of these families was nicknamed "Smychiaid" or "Simychiaid"; and my informant, who is not yet quite forty, says that he heard his mother repeat scores of times that the old people used to say that the Smychiaid, who were very numerous in the neighbourhood, were descended from fairies, and that they came from Corwrion Lake. At all this the Smychiaid were wont to grow mightily angry. Another tradition, he says, about them was that it was a wandering family that arrived in the district from the direction of Conwy, and that the father's name was Simwch, or rather that was his nickname, based on the proper name Simwnt, which appears to have once been the prevalent name in Llandegai. The order of these words would in that case have been Simwnt, Simwch, Simychiaid, Smychiaid. Now "Simwnt" seems to be merely the Welsh form given to some such English name as Simond, just as Edmund or Edmond becomes in North Wales "Emwnt". The objection to the nickname seems to lie in the fact, which one of my correspondents points out to me, that "Simwch" is understood to mean a monkey, a point on which I should like to have further information. Pughe gives Simach, it is true, as having that meaning. A branch of the same family is said to be called "y Cowperiaid" or the Coopers, from an ancestor who was either by name or by trade a cooper. Mr. Hughes's account of the Smychiaid is, that they are the descendants of one Simonds, who came to be a bailiff at Bodysgallan, and moved from there to Coetmor in the same neighbourhood. Simonds was obnoxious to the bards, he goes on to say, and they described the Smychiaid as having arrived