g is said as to his subsequent career.

[Illustration: THE ESCAPE OF KING GRADLON FROM THE FLOODED CITY OF YS]

An ancient ballad on the subject, which, however, bears marks of
having been tampered with, states, on the other hand, that Gradlon led
his people into extravagances of every kind, and that Dahut received
the key from him, the misuse of which precipitated the catastrophe.
Dahut, the ballad continues, became a mermaid and haunted the waters
which roll over the site of the city where she loved and feasted.
"Fisherman," ends the ballad, "have you seen the daughter of the sea
combing her golden hair in the midday sun at the fringes of the
beach?" "Yes," replies the fisherman, "I have seen the white daughter
of the sea, and I have heard her sing, and her songs were plaintive as
the sound of the waves."

The legend of Ys, of the town swallowed up by the sea, is common to
the several branches of the Celtic race. In Wales the site of the
submerged city is in Cardigan Bay, and in Ireland it is Lough Neagh,
as Tom Moore says:

On Lough Neagh's bank as the fisherman strays,
When the clear, cold eve's declining,
He sees the round towers of other days
In the wave beneath him shining.

This legend had its rise in an extraordinary story which was given
currency to by Giraldus Cambrensis in his _Topography of Ireland_, to
the effect that a certain extremely wicked tribe were punished for
their sins by the inundation of their territory.

"Now there was a common proverb," says Gerald, "in the mouths of the
tribe, that whenever the well-spring of that country was left
uncovered (for out of reverence shown to it, from a barbarous
superstition, the spring was kept covered and sealed), it would
immediately overflow and inundate the whole province, drowning and
destroying the whole population. It happened, however, on some
occasion that a young woman, who had come to the spring to draw water,
after filling her pitcher, but before she had closed the well, ran in
great haste to her little boy, whom she had heard crying at a spot not
far from the spring where she had left him. But the voice of the
people is the voice of God; and on her way back she met such a flood
of water from the spring that it swept off her and the boy, and the
inundation was so violent that they both, and the whole tribe, with
their cattle, were drowned in an hour in this partial and local
deluge. The waters, having covered the whole surface of