ic,
and woollen work!" If, then, there were a family at Myddfai celebrated
for their leechcraft, and possessed of lands and influence, as we know
was the fact, their hereditary skill would seem to an ignorant peasantry
to demand a supernatural origin; and their wealth and material power
would not refuse the additional consideration which a connection with
the legend of the neighbouring pool would bring them.

But for all that the incident of the reappearance by the mother to her
children may have been part of the original story. The Carnarvonshire
fairies of various tales analogous to that of the Van Pool are recalled
by maternal love to the scenes of their wedded life; and the hapless
father hears his wife's voice outside the window chanting pathetically:

"If my son should feel it cold,
Let him wear his father's coat;
If the fair one feel the cold,
Let her wear my petticoat!"

Whatever he may have thought of these valuable directions, they hardly
seem to us sufficient to have brought the lady up from "the bottomless
pool of Corwrion" to utter. There is more sense in the mother's song in
a Kaffir tale. This woman was not of purely supernatural origin. She was
born in consequence of her (human) mother's eating pellets given her by
a bird. Married to a chief by whom she was greatly beloved, it was
noticed that she never went out of doors by day. In her husband's
absence her father-in-law forced her to go and fetch water from the
river for him in the daytime. Like the woman by the waters of the Rhone,
she was drawn down into the river. That evening her child cried
piteously; and the nurse took it to the stream in the middle of the
night, singing:

"It is crying, it is crying,
The child of Sihamba Ngenyanga;
It is crying, it will not be pacified."

The mother thereupon came out of the water, and wailed this song as she
put the child to her breast:

"It is crying, it is crying,
The child of the walker by moonlight.
It was done intentionally by people whose names are unmentionable.[235]
They sent her for water during the day.
She tried to dip with the milk-basket, and then it sank.
Tried to dip with the ladle, and then it sank.
Tried to dip with the mantle, and then it sank."

The result of the information conveyed in these words was her ultimate
recovery by her husband with the assistance of her mother, who was a
skilful sorceress.[236]

A Finnish tale be