There are ghosts, too, in Wales, but they are rather spiritless creatures, much easier to catch and not so tricksy as the fairies. Nor do they select prickly furze and stony hilltops as their hiding-places. But on the whole they are difficult to subdue, especially the farm ghosts. While the servants are busy making the butter, the ghost or spirit frequently throws something unclean into the milk or sends the pans spinning around like mad. In one farm the farmer offered a reward of five pounds to any one who would lay their particularly lively spirit. Several people tried it, including an aged priest in whose face the impertinent ghost waved a woman's bonnet. Finally, the Established Church being unable to cope with this sprightly situation, an Independent minister from Llanarmon coaxed the ghost into the barn. There the spirit, still unsubdued, turned into a lion, a mastiff, and other ferocious beasts, but in no incarnation could it do any harm to the Independent Griffiths. It became discouraged, and the minister persuaded the poor thing to appear in the form of a fly. Perhaps in this incarnation the wretched thing still had hopes of revenge. However, the intrepid Griffiths was too much for it, and it

was captured in a tobacco box and borne off, never to trouble the farmer any more.

The death portents in Cambria reveal all the strangeness and lawlessness of the Celtic imagination. No one who does not know the Welsh hills, who has not been on them day after day, can feel the significance of these death portents. One must have travelled on the top and edge of the Welsh mountain world to understand,have looked out upon a sea of hills gray and barren in their utter colourlessness, and down upon valleys like the valley of the shadow of death. There abyss and altitude are alike full of terrors, of mist before which mind and step falter, of an Unknown which presses home in bodily anguish, which distorts the vision and strikes. upon the ear with the outcry of bewildered souls. It is not strange, then, that the Welsh have the most horrible of banshees. It is known as the Gwrach y Rhybin, the old hag of the mist; and a Cyhyraeth which moans dolefully in the night but is never seen; and a Tolaeth which groans or sings or saws, or tramps with its feet, and is also unseen. And there are, besides, the "Dogs of Hell" and the "Dogs of the Sky" and the "Corpse Candle" and the "Goblin

Funeral,”—all of them portents of death. Several years ago I came very near seeing one of these portentous dogs. I was on a treeless upland pasture, rich with ruby like a deep agate, with lavender, flecked with emerald-green as musk is freaked with brown; purple, pink, and opalescent in the sunshine that came and went. There were black sheep and white in that pasture, I remember, and some little lambs that straddled with surprise. One rose, stretching and curling its tail with the delicious energy of waking from sleep. I looked down what seemed like a particoloured gulf of greensward into valleys where men and cattle had become dots in size, and up to more fern and heather and altitudes where the curlew cried. It was as I looked up that I saw an impressively large black dog that went through an impossibly small sheep-hole in a sheep-wall. But a wisp of mist came over the Welsh mountainside, and one never makes an effort to see that sort of thing or to run after it. Hunting rollicking elves and lightfoot fairies is quite a different matter!

One of the most beautiful legends in the Iolo Manuscripts is the story of one of these death portents. There was a lord rich in houses and

land and gold. Every luxury of life was his for the asking. One night he heard a voice cry out distinctly three times, "The greatest and richest man of this parish shall perish to-night." He was aware that there was no other man so great or rich as he, and he sent for the physician and prepared to die. But the night passed and day came and he still lived. At sunrise he heard the bell tolling and knew that some one must have died, and he sent to enquire who it was. It was an old blind beggar who had asked for charity at the lord's gate and been refused. Then this great lord saw that the voice had come as a warning to him, that his riches were as nothing in comparison with the treasure and wealth which the blind man had in the kingdom of heaven. He accepted the warning and relieved all who were poor or in need. When he died, angels were heard to sing him a welcome, and after his death he was buried, as he had asked to be, in the blind beggar's grave.

Of hags and witches there used to be far too many in Wales. Shakespeare tells all one needs to know of them. For some reasons, hidden to us, he had peculiarly intimate and extensive information concerning Celtic folk-lore. Mac

beth, speaking of witches, says, "I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them. than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished." These witches did not hesitate to throw even portions of human beings into seething cauldrons:"Round about the cauldron go;

In the poisoned entrails throw."

They threw in other things, too, as the third witch tells us, —

"Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digged i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,

Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips."

In Wales the knowledge which witches possessed they did not use for the good of others, but for their hurt; they tormented children and animals, they plagued the hard-working and industrious, and upset the Welsh household. In Cambria there are witches unlike any I have