hands!"

"Listen, my sister; do you not hear the noise of the gay musicians who
shall play at our wedding?" He had not finished speaking when his
horse threw itself back on its haunches all at once, trembling and
whinnying loudly.

Gwennolaik looked around, and found herself on an island where a crowd
of people were dancing. Lads and lasses, they danced most bravely
beneath the green trees heavy with apples, and the music to which they
tripped was as that of heaven.

Suddenly the sun rose above the eastern mountains and flooded this
strange new world with rich light, and there Gwennolaik found her
mother and her two sisters, and there was nothing in her heart but
beauty and joy.

On the following morning, as the sun rose, the young women carried the
body of Gwennolaik and laid it in the tomb of her foster-brother in
the White Church.

In this ballad--for the original from which we take the tale is cast
in ballad form--we are once more in touch with the Celtic Otherworld.
It is a thousand pities that this interesting piece breaks off where
it does, thus failing to provide us with a fuller account of that most
elusive realm. The short glimpse we do get of it, however, reminds us
very much of the descriptions of it we possess in Irish lore. We have
also once more the phenomenon of the dead lover who comes to claim the
living bride, the midnight gallop, and other circumstances
characteristic of ballad literature. There was a tradition in Lower
Brittany, however, that no soul might be admitted to the other world
which had not first received burial, but here, of course, we must look
for Christian influence.

CHAPTER VII: POPULAR LEGENDS OF BRITTANY

"The legend," says Gomme, in a passage most memorable for students of
folk-lore as containing his acute and precise definition of the
several classes of tradition, "belongs to an historical personage,
locality, or event,"[40] and it is in this general sense that the term
is employed in regard to the contents of this chapter, unless where
mythic or folk-lore matter is introduced for the sake of analogy or
illustration. There is, however, a broad, popular reading of the term
as indicating the fanciful-historical. When we read of the King of Ys,
or Arthur, for example, we are not aware whether they ever existed or
not, but they are alluded to by tradition as ancient rulers of
Brittany and Britain, just as Cymbeline and Cole are spoken of as
British monarchs of the d