colour than black: this she was to place to bake before a wood fire with its feathers and all intact. Moreover, as soon as she placed it before the fire, she was to close every hole and passage in the walls except one, and not to look very intently after the crimbil until the hen was done enough and the feathers had fallen off it every one: then she might look where he was.

'Strange as the advice of the wise man sounded, she resolved to try it; so she went the next day to search among the hens for one of the requisite description; but to her disappointment she failed to find one. She then walked from one farm house to another in her search; but fortune appeared to scowl at her, as she seemed to fail in her object. When, however, she was nearly disheartened, she came across the kind of hen she wanted at a farm at the end of the parish. She bought it, and after returning home she arranged the fire and killed the hen, which she placed in front of the bright fire burning on the hearth. Whilst watching the hen baking she altogether forgot the crimbil; and she fell into a sort of swoon, when she was astonished by the sound of music outside the house, similar to the music she had heard a few nights before at the crossroads. The feathers had by this time fallen off the hen, and when she came to look for the crimbil he had disappeared. The mother cast wild looks about the house, and to her joy she heard the voice of her lost son calling to her from outside. She ran to meet him, and embraced him fervently. But when she asked him where he had been so long, he had no account in the world to give but that he had been listening to pleasant music. He was very thin and worn in appearance when he was restored. Such is the story of the Lost Child.'

Let me remark as to the urchin's exclamation con1 It was peat fires that were usual in those days even in Glamorgan.

cerning the cooking done in the egg-shell, that Mr. Hughes, as the result of further inquiry, has given me what he considers a more correct version; but it is no less inconsequent, as will be seen :

Mi glywais gan fy nhad ac yntau gan ei dad, a hwnnw gan ei dad yntau, Fod mesen cyn derwen a'i phlannu mwn dâr:

Ni chlywais yn unman am gymysg y bastai yn masgal wy iâr.

I heard from my father and he from his father, and that one from his father, That the acorn exists before the oak and the planting of it in the ground: Never anywhere have I heard of mixing the pasty in the shell of a hen's egg.

In Dewi Glan Ffrydlas' story from the Ogwen Valley, in Carnarvonshire, p. 62 above, it is not the cooking of a pasty but the brewing of beer in an egg-shell. However what is most remarkable is that the egg-shell is similarly used in stories from other lands. Mr. Hartland cites one from Mecklenburg and another from Scandinavia. He also mentions stories in which the imp measures his own age by the number of forests which he has seen growing successively on the same soil, the formula being of the following kind: 'I have seen the Forest of Ardennes burnt seven times,' 'Seven times have I seen the wood fall in Lessö Forest,' or 'I am so old, I was already in the world before the Kamschtschen Wood (in Lithuania) was planted, wherein great trees grew, and that is now laid waste again. From these and the like instances it is clear that the Welsh versions here in question are partially blurred, as the fairy child's words should have been to the effect that he was old enough to remember the oak when it was yet but an acorn; and an instance of this explicit kind is given by Howells-it comes from ILandrygarn in Anglesey see p. 139, where his words run thus: 'I can remember yon oak an acorn, but I never saw in my life people brewing in an egg-shell before.' I may add

1 See Hartland's Science of Fairy Tales, pp. 112-6.

that I have been recently fortunate enough to obtain from Mr. Lywarch Reynolds another kind of estimate of the fairy urchin's age. He writes that his mother remembers a very old Merthyr woman who used to tell the story of the egg-shell cookery, but in words differing from all the other versions known to him, thus:

Wy'n hên y dyd hedy,

Ag yn byw cyn y ngeni:

Eriód ni welas i ferwi

I call myself old this day,
And living before my birth:
Never have I seen food boiled

Bwyd i'r fedal mwn cwcwtł1 wy iår. For the reapers in an egg-shell.

As to the urchin's statement that he was old and had lived before, it is part of a creed of which we may have something to say in a later chapter. At this point let it suffice to call attention to the same idea in the Book of Taliessin, poem ix:

Hynaf uyd dyn pan anher
A ieu ieu pop amser.

A man is wont to be oldest when born,
And younger and younger all the time.

XIV.

Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies. to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men who

1

In no other version has Mr. Reynolds heard cwcwlt wy iar, but either plisgyn or cibyn wy iár, to which I may add masgal from Mr. Craigfryn Hughes' versions. The word cwcwt usually means a cowl, but perhaps it is best here to treat cwcwlt as a distinct word derived somehow from conchylium or the French coquille, ‘a shell.'

induced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David1, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king's son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies' mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron 2. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus' yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his own Britannica Lingua, 'Brythoneg, or Welsh.' In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek 3, which he accounted

1 The whole passage will be found in the Itinerarium Kambriæ, i. 8 (pp. 75-8), and Giraldus fixes the story a little before his time somewhere in the district around Swansea and Neath. With this agrees closely enough the fact that a second David, Dafyd ab Gerald or David Fitzgerald, appears to have been consecrated Bishop of St. David's in 1147, and to have died in 1176.

The words in the original are: Nec carne vescebantur, nec pisce; lacteis plerumque cibariis utentes, et in pultis modum quasi croco confectis.

Perhaps it is this also that suggested the name Eliodorus, as it were 'HAódapos; for the original name was probably the medieval Welsh one of

for by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of the Lingua Britannica ; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of the Germania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.

Giraldus' words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point from Ysten Sioned (Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16. Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:-The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it from

=

Elidyr Irish Ailithir, ailither, a pilgrim': compare the Pembrokeshire name Pergrin and the like. It is curious that Elidyr did not occur to Glasynys and prevent him from substituting Elfod, which is quite another name, and more correctly written Elfod for the earlier El-fodw, found not only as Elbodu but also Elbodug-o, Elbodg, Elbot and Elfod: see p. 117 above.