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neighbour, an old woman overtaken by the decrepitude of eighty summers, should call to her that her darling was crying. It was not long before she heard the old woman calling to her; she ran hurriedly, and as soon as she set foot on the kitchen floor she took her little one in her arms as usual, saying to him, "O my little one! thy mother's delight art thou! I would not take the world for thee, &c." But to her surprise he had a very old look about him, and the more the tender-hearted mother gazed at his face, the stranger it seemed to her, so that at last she placed him in the cradle and told her trouble and sorrow to her relatives and acquaintances. And after this one and the other had given his opinion, it was agreed at last that it was one of Rhys Dwfn's children that was in the cradle, and not her dearly loved baby. In this distress there was nothing to do but to fetch a sorcerer, as fast as the fastest horse could gallop. He said, when he saw the child, that he had seen his like before, and that it would be a hard job to get rid of him, though not such a very hard job this time. The shovel was made red hot in the fire by one of the Cefnarth1 boys, and held before the child's face; and in an instant the short little old man took to his heels, and neither he nor his like was seen afterwards from Aber Cuch to Aber Bargoed at any rate. The mother, it is said, found her darling unscathed the next moment. I remember also hearing that the strange child was as old as the grandfather of the one that had been lost.'

As I see no reason to make any profound distinction between lake maidens and sea maidens, I now give Gwynionyd's account of the mermaid who was found

This is ordinarily written Cenarth, the name of a parish on the Teifi, where the three counties of Cardigan, Pembroke, and Carmar. then meet.

by a fisherman from ILandydoch or St. Dogmael's1, near Cardigan: see the Brython, i. 82:

'One fine afternoon in September, in the beginning of the last century, a fisherman, whose name was Pergrin, went to a recess in the rock near Pen Cemmes, where he found a sea maiden doing her hair, and he took the water lady prisoner to his boat. . . . We know not what language is used by sea maidens . . . but this one, this time at any rate, talked, it is said, very good Welsh; for when she was in despair in Pergrin's custody, weeping copiously, and with her tresses all dishevelled, she called

The name Lan Dydoch occurs in the Bruts, A. D. 987 and 1089, and is the one still in use in Welsh; but the English St. Dogmael's shows that it is derived from that of Dogfael's name when the mutation consonant for v was still written m. In Welsh the name of the saint has been worn down to Dogwel, as in St. Dogwell's near Fishguard, and ILanđogwel in Lanrhuđlad parish in Anglesey: see Reece's Welsh Saints, p. 211. It points back to an early Brythonic form Doco-maglos, with doco of the same origin as Latin dux, dücis, 'a leader,' and maglo-s≈ Irish māl, 'a lord or prince.' Dogfael's name assumes in Lan Dydoch a Goidelic form, for Dog-fael would have to become in Irish Doch-mhäl, which, cut down to Doch with the honorific prefix to, has yielded Ty-doch; but I am not clear why it is not Ty-doch. Another instance of a Goidelic form of a name having the local preference in Wales to this day offers itself in Cyfelach and Lan Gyfelach in Glamorganshire. The Welsh was formerly Cimeliauc (Reece, p. 274). Here may also be mentioned St. Cyngar, otherwise called Docwinnus (Reece, p. 183), but the name occurs in the Liber Landavensis in the genitive both as Docunn-i and Docguinni, the former of which seems easily explained as Goidelic for an early form of Cyngar, namely Cuno-caros, from which would be formed To-chun or Do-chun. This is what seems to underlie the Latin Docunnus, while Docguinni is possibly a Goidelic modification of the written Docunni, unless some such a name as Doco-vindo-s has been confounded with Docunnus. In one instance the Book of Lan Dâv has instead of Abbas Docunni or Docguinni, the shorter designation, Abbas Dochou (p. 145), which one must not unhesitatingly treat as Dochon, seeing that Dochou would be in later book Welsh Dochau, and in the dialect of the district Docha ; and that this occurs in the name of the church of ILandough near Cardiff, and ILandough near Cowbridge. The connexion of a certain saint Dochdwy with these churches does not appear at all satisfactorily established, but more light is required to help one to understand these and similar church names.

* This name which may have come from Little England below Wales, was once not uncommon in South Cardiganshire, as Mr. Williams informs me. but it is now mostly changed as a surname into Davies and Jones! Compare the similar fortunes of the name Mason mentioned above, p. 68.

out: 'Pergrin, if thou wilt let me go, I will give thee three shouts in the time of thy greatest need.' So, in wonder and fear, he let her go to walk the streets of the deep, and visit her sweethearts there. Days and weeks passed without Pergrin seeing her after this; but one hot afternoon, when the sea was pretty calm, and the fishermen had no thought of danger, behold his old acquaintance showing her head and locks, and shouting out in a loud voice: 'Pergrin! Pergrin! Pergrin! take up thy nets, take up thy nets, take up thy nets!' Pergrin and his companion instantly obeyed the message, and drew their nets in with great haste. In they went, past the bar, and by the time they had reached the Pwll Cam the most terrible storm had overspread the sea, while he and his companion were safe on land. Twice nine others had gone out with them, but they were all drowned without having the chance of obeying the warning of the water lady.' Perhaps it is not quite irrelevant to mention here the armorial bearings which Drayton ascribes to the neighbouring county of Cardigan in the following couplet in his Battaile of Agincourt (London, 1631), p. 23:

As Cardigan the next to them that went,

Came with a Mermayd sitting on a Rock.

A writer in the Brython, iv. 194, states that the people of Nefyn in ILeyn claim the story of the fisher and the mermaid as belonging to them, which proves that a similar legend has been current there: add to this the fact mentioned in the Brython, iii. 133, that a red mermaid with yellow hair, on a white field, figures in the coat of arms of the family resident at Glasfryn in the parish of Langybi, in Eifionyd or the southern portion of Carnarvonshire; and we have already suggested that Glasynys' story (pp. 117-25) was made

up, to a certain extent, of materials found on the coasts of Carnarvonshire. A small batch of stories about South Wales mermaids is given by a writer who calls himself Ab Nadol', in the Brython, iv. 310, as follows:

'A few rockmen are said to have been working, about eighty years ago, in a quarry near Porth y Rhaw, when the day was calm and clear, with nature, as it were, feasting, the flowers shedding sweet scent around, and the hot sunshine beaming into the jagged rocks. Though an occasional wave rose to strike the romantic cliffs, the sea was like a placid lake, with its light coverlet of blue attractive enough to entice one of the ladies of Rhys Dwfn forth from the town seen by Daniel Huws off Trefin as he was journeying between Fishguard and St. David's in the year 1858, to make her way to the top of a stone and to sit on it to disentangle her flowing silvery hair. Whilst she was cleaning herself, the rockmen went down, and when they got near her they perceived that, from her waist upwards, she was like the lasses of Wales, but that, from her waist downwards, she had the body of a fish. And, when they began to talk to her, they found she spoke Welsh, though she only uttered the following few words to them: "Reaping in Pembrokeshire and weeding in Carmarthenshire." Off she then went to walk in the depth of the sea towards her home. Another tale is repeated about a mermaid, said to have been caught by men below the land of ILanwnda, near the spot, if not on the spot, where the French made their landing afterwards, and three miles to the west of Fishguard. It then goes on to say that they carried her to their home, and kept her in a secure place for

'I have not succeeded in discovering who the writer was, who used this

name.

some time; before long, she begged to be allowed to return to the brine land, and gave the people of the house three bits of advice; but I only remember one of them,' he writes, 'and this is it: "Skim the surface of the pottage before adding sweet milk to it: it will be whiter and sweeter, and less of it will do." I was told that this family follow the three advices to this day.' A somewhat similar advice to that about the pottage is said to have been given by a mermaid, under similar circumstances, to a Manxman.

After putting the foregoing bits together, I was favoured by Mr. Benjamin Williams with notes on the tales and on the persons from whom he heard them: they form the contents of two or three letters, mostly answers to queries of mine, and the following is the substance of them:-Mr. Williams is a native of the valley of Troed yr Aur1, in the Cardiganshire parish of that name. He spent a part of his youth at Verwig, in the angle between the northern bank of the Teifi and Cardigan Bay. He heard of Rhys Dwfn's Children first from a distant relative of his father's, a Catherine Thomas, who came to visit her daughter, who lived not far from his father's house: that would now be from forty-eight to fifty years ago. He was very young at the time, and of Rhys Dwfn's progeny he formed a wonderful idea, which was partly due also to the talk of one James Davies or Siàms Mocyn, who was very well up in folklore, and was one of his father's next-door neighbours. He was an old man, and nephew to the musician, David

This name as it is now written should mean 'the Gold's Foot,' but in the Demetian dialect aur is pronounced oer, and I learn from the rector, the Rev. Rhys Jones Lloyd, that the name has sometimes been written Tref Deyrn, which I regard as some etymologist's futile attempt to explain it. More importance is to be attached to the name on the communion cup, dating 1828, and reading, as Mr. Lloyd kindly informs me, Poculum Eclyseye de Tre-droyre. Beneath Droyre some personal name possibly lies concealed.

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