s sound? Wherefore do the priests
chant so low?"

"'Tis nothing, daughter," replies the elder woman. "A poor stranger
who lodged here died this night."

"Ah, where is gone the Seigneur of Nann? Mother, oh, where is he?"

[Illustration: THE SEIGNEUR OF NANN AND THE KORRIGAN]

"He has gone to the town, my child. In a little he will come to see
you."

"Ah, mother, let us speak of happy things. Must I wear my red or my
blue robe at my churching?"

"Neither, daughter. The mode is changed. You must wear black."

Unconscious in its art, the stream of verse carries us to the church,
whence the young wife has gone to offer up thanks for the gift of
children. She sees that the ancestral tomb has been opened, and a
great dread is at her heart. She asks her mother-in-law who has died,
and the old woman at last confesses that the Seigneur of Nann has just
been buried.

That same night the young mother was interred beside her husband-lover.
And the peasant folk say that from that tomb arose two saplings, the
branches of which intertwined more closely as they grew.

_A Goddess of Eld_

In the depths of Lake Tegid in our own Wales dwelt Keridwen, a
fertility goddess who possessed a magic cauldron--the sure symbol of a
deity of abundance.[22] Like Demeter, she was strangely associated
with the harmless necessary sow, badge of many earth-mothers, and
itself typical of fertility. Like Keridwen, the Korrigan is associated
with water, with the element which makes for vegetable growth.
Christian belief would, of course, transform this discredited goddess
into an evil being whose one function was the destruction of souls.
May we see a relation of the Korrigan and Keridwen in Tridwan, or St
Triduana, of Restalrig, near Edinburgh, who presided over a certain
well there, and at whose well-shrine offerings were made by sightless
pilgrims for many centuries?

Many are the traditions which tell of human infants abducted by the
Korrigan, who at times left an ugly changeling in place of the babe
she had stolen. But it was more as an enchantress that she was
dreaded. By a stroke of her magic wand she could transform the leafy
fastnesses in which she dwelt into the semblance of a lordly hall,
which the luckless traveller whom she lured thither would regard as a
paradise after the dark thickets in which he had been wandering. This
seeming castle or palace she furnished with everything that could
delight the eye, and as the doomed wretch