he
right, and that by this means he distinguished her from her sisters.
Whatever were the means, the end was secured; he selected her, and she
immediately left the lake and accompanied him to his farm. Before she
quitted, she summoned to attend her from the lake seven cows, two oxen,
and one bull.

This lady engaged to live with him until such time as he would strike her
three times without cause. For some years they lived together in
comfort, and she bore him three sons, who were the celebrated Meddygon
Myddvai.

One day, when preparing for a fair in the neighbourhood, he desired her
to go to the field for his horse. She said she would; but being rather
dilatory, he said to her humorously, '_dos_, _dos_, _dos_,' i.e., 'go,
go, go,' and he slightly touched her arm _three times_ with his glove.

As she now deemed the terms of her marriage broken, she immediately
departed, and summoned with her her seven cows, her two oxen, and the
bull. The oxen were at that very time ploughing in the field, but they
immediately obeyed her call, and took the plough with them. The furrow
from the field in which they were ploughing, to the margin of the lake,
is to be seen in several parts of that country to the present day.

After her departure, she once met her two sons in a Cwm, now called _Cwm
Meddygon_ (Physicians' Combe), and delivered to each of them a bag
containing some articles which are unknown, but which are supposed to
have been some discoveries in medicine.

The Meddygon Myddvai were Rhiwallon and his sons, Cadwgan, Gruffydd, and
Einion. They were the chief physicians of their age, and they wrote
about A.D. 1230. A copy of their works is in the Welsh School Library,
in Gray's Inn Lane."

Such are the Welsh Taboo tales. I will now make a few remarks upon them.

The _age_ of these legends is worthy of consideration. The legend of
_Meddygon Myddvai_ dates from about the thirteenth century. Rhiwallon
and his sons, we are told by the writer in the _Cambro-Briton_, wrote
about 1230 A.D., but the editor of that publication speaks of a
manuscript written by these physicians about the year 1300. Modern
experts think that their treatise on medicine in the _Red Book of
Hergest_ belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, about 1380 to
1400.

_Dafydd ab Gwilym_, who is said to have flourished in the fourteenth
century, says, in one of his poems, as given in the _Cambro-Briton_, vol.
ii., p. 313, alluding to these p