of Gwastad Annas. The name of her husband, my grandfather, was William Prichard [= W. ab Rhisiart, or Richard's son], son to Richard William, of the Efail Newyd. The name of their eldest son, my uncle (brother to my mother), was Hugh Hughes, and the second son's name was Richard William. The mother had the privilege of naming her first-born after her own family in case it was a boy; but if it happened to be a girl, she took her name from the father's family, for which reason my mother's maiden name was Catharine Williams. This remained her name to the day of her death and the old people at Bedgelert persisted in calling me, so long as I was at home, William Prichard, after my grandfather, as I was my mother's eldest child.

'Most of the tales I have collected,' says Mr. Jones, ' relate to the parishes of Beđgelert and Dolwyđelen. My kindred have lived for generations in those two parishes, and they are very numerous: in fact, it used to be said that the people of Dolwyđelen and Bedgelert were all cousins. They were mostly small farmers, and jealous of all strangers, so that they married almost without exception from the one parish into the other. This intermixture helped to carry the tales of the one parish to the other, and to perpetuate them on the hearths of their homes from generation to generation, until they were swept away by another influence in this century. Many of my ancestors seem to have been very fond of stories, poetry, and singing, and I have been told that some of them were very skilled in these things. So also, in the case of my parents, the memory of the past had a great charm for them on both sides; and when the relatives from Dolwyđelen and Bedgelert met in either parish, there used to be no end to the recounting of pedigrees and the repeating of tales for

the best. By listening to them, I had been filled with desire to become an adept in pedigrees and legends. My parents used to let me go every evening to the house of my grandfather, William ab Rhisiart, the clerk, to listen to tales, and to hear edifying books read. My grandfather was a reader "without his rival," and "he used to beat the parson hollow." Many people used to meet at Pen y Bont in the evenings to converse together, and the stories of some of them were now and then exceedingly eloquent. Of course, I listened with eager ears and open mouth, in order, if I heard anything new, to be able to repeat it to my mother. She, unwilling to let herself be beaten, would probably relate another like it, which she had heard from her mother, her grandmother, or her old aunt of Gwastad Annas, who was a fairly good verse-wright of the homely kind. Then my father, if he did not happen to be busy with his music-book, would also give us a tale which he had heard from his grandmother or grandfather, the old John Jones, of Tyn ILan Dolwyđelen, or somebody else would do so. That is one source from which I got my knowledge of folklore; but this ceased when we moved from Bedgelert to Carnarvon in the year 1841. My grandfather died in 1844, aged seventy-eight.

'Besides those,' Mr. Jones goes on to say, 'who used to come to my grandfather's house and to his workshop to relate stories, the blacksmith's shop used to be, especially on a rainy day, a capital place for a story, and many a time did I lurk there instead of going to school, in order to hear old William Dafyd, the sawyer, who, peace be to his ashes! drank many a hornful from the Big Quart without ever breaking down, and old Ifan Owen, the fisherman, tearing away for the best at their yarns, sometimes a tissue of lies and sometimes truth. The former was funny, and a great wag, up to all kinds

of tricks. He made everybody laugh, whereas the latter would preserve the gravity of a saint, however lying might be the tale which he related. Ifan Owen's best stories were about the Water Spirit, or, as he called it, Lamhigyn y Dwr, "the Water Leaper." He had not himself seen the Lamhigyn, but his father had seen it "hundreds of times." Many an evening it had prevented him from catching a single fish in ILyn Gwynan, and, when the fisherman got on this theme, his eloquence was apt to become highly polysyllabic in its adjectives. Once in particular, when he had been angling for hours towards the close of the day, without catching anything, he found that something took the fly clean off the hook each time he cast it. After moving from one spot to another on the lake, he fished opposite the Benlan Wen, when something gave his line a frightful pull, "and, by the gallows, I gave another pull," the fisherman used to say, "with all the force of my arm out it came, and up it went off the hook, whilst I turned round to see, as it dashed so against the cliff of Benlan that it blazed like a lightning." He used to add, "If that was not the Lamhigyn, it must have been the very devil himself." That cliff must be two hundred yards at least from the shore. As to his father, he had seen the Water Spirit many times, and he had also been fishing in the ILyn Glâs or Ffynnon Lâs, once upon a time, when he hooked a wonderful and fearful monster: it was not like a fish, but rather resembled a toad, except that it had a tail and wings instead of legs. He pulled it easily enough towards the shore, but, as its head was coming out of the water, it gave a terrible shriek that was enough to split the fisherman's bones to the marrow, and, had there not been a friend standing by, he would have fallen headlong into the lake, and been possibly dragged like a sheep into

the depth; for there is a tradition that if a sheep got into the ILyn Glâs, it could not be got out again, as something would at once drag it to the bottom. This used to be the belief of the shepherds of Cwm Dyli, within my memory, and they acted on it in never letting their dogs go after the sheep in the neighbourhood of this lake. These two funny fellows, William Dafyd and Ifan Owen, died long ago, without leaving any of their descendants blessed with as much as the faintest gossamer thread of the story-teller's mantle. The former, if he had been still living, would now be no less than 129 years of age, and the latter about 120.'

Mr. Jones proceeds to say that he had stories from sources besides those mentioned, namely, from Lowri Robart, wife of Rhisiart Edwart, the 'Old Guide'; from his old aunt of Gwastad Annas; from William Wmffra, husband to his grandmother's sister; from his grandmother, who was a native of Dolwydelen, but had been brought up at Pwffgwernog, in Nanmor; from her sister; and from Gruffud Prisiart, of Nanmor, afterwards of Glan Colwyn, who gave him the legend of Owen Lawgoch of which I shall have something to say later, and the story of the bogie of Pen Pwll Coch, which I do not know. 'But the chief story-teller of his time at Bedgelert,' Mr. Jones goes on to say, 'was Twm Ifan Siams (pronounced Siăms or Shăms), brother, I believe, to Dafyd Siôn Siams, of the Penrhyn, who was a bard and pedigree man. Twm lived at Nanmor, but I know not what his vocation was; his relatives, however, were small farmers, carpenters, and masons. It is not improbable that he was also an artisan, as he was conversant with numbers, magnitude, and letters, and left behind him a volume forming a pedigree book known at Nanmor as the Barcud Mawr, or "Great Kite," as Gruffud Prisiart told me. The latter had been reading it many

a time in order to know the origin of somebody or other. All I can remember of this character is that he was very old-over 90-and that he went from house to house in his old age to relate tales and recount pedigrees: great was the welcome he had from everybody everywhere. I remember, also, that he was small of stature, nimble, witty, exceedingly amusing, and always ready with his say on every subject. He was in the habit of calling on my grandfather in his rambles, and very cordial was the reception which my parents always gave him on account of his tales and his knowledge of pedigrees. The story of the afanc, as given in my collection, is from his mouth. You will observe how little difference there is between his version 1 and that known to Edward ILwyd in the year 1695. I had related this story to a friend of mine at Portmadoc, who was grandson or great-grandson to Dafyd Sion Siams, of Penrhyn, in 1858, when he called my attention to the same story in the Cambrian Journal from the correspondence of Edward ILwyd. I was surprised at the similarity between the two versions, and I went to Bedgelert to Gruffud Rhisiart, who was related to Twm Siôn Siams. I read the story to him, and I found that he had heard it related by his uncle just as it was by me, and as given in the Cambrian Journal. Twm Ifan Siams had funny stories about the tricks of Gwrach y Rhibyn, the Bodach Glas, and the Bubach Lwyd, which he localized in Nanmor and ILanfrothen; he had, also, a very eloquent tale about the courtship between a sailor from Moel y Gest, near Portmadoc, and a mermaid, of which I retain a fairly

Since the editing of this volume was begun I have heard that it is intended to publish the Welsh collection which Mr. Jones has made: so I shall only give a translation of the Edward ILwyd version of the afanc story see section v. of this chapter.

This word is not in Welsh dictionaries, but it is Scotch and Manx Gaelic, and is possibly a remnant of the Goidelic once spoken in Gwyneđ.