Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/86

 64 Collectanea.

rheumatism, and does not go out much. She repeated to me the same stories as Mrs. Pryce about Jack o' Kent, but is most interesting on the subject of fairies. I think she beHeves in them ; at least she thinks they make fairy rings — it is much the simplest explanation !

There was a tradition at Trelleck, she says, of a fiddler having been lost in a cave ; he was heard playing underground for years afterwards. Another story of the same sort, or pos- sibly an explanation of the above, is that some people passing through a certain meadow used to hear lovely music. Several times they heard it, and at last they collected some folk together to investigate it. They traced the music to a certain spot, and there they dug in the ground, disclosing at last an underground cave wherein were two old men, hermit-like, playing, one a violin, the other a harp. They had been there many years, and used to take it in turns to go out at night and fetch food. Very old and decrepit they were, and soon after they were taken from underground they died.

Mrs. Bevan's mother was an Irishwoman, and used to see many strange things. Before her father died she heard the Banshee outside her window — a strange, singing cry. And one night her family had gone out, having arranged to throw up gravel to her window to be let in on their return ; she had gone to bed, but presently she heard something outside and put her head under the bed-clothes. When she lifted it up there was an old man in the room, clad in silk stockings, buckled shoes, and a three-cornered hat I (suppose he had other garments, but Mrs. Bevan did not mention them). He walked up to the bed and looked at her, then to the window, then back to her — and vanished. The family had to get in by a ladder, and found the ghost-seer in a faint.

When her husband was at Gibraltar Mrs. Bevan's mother came to live in Monmouth, for when trying to get a pass to go out to him she had drawn a blank.

One day she had been up to Mitchel Troy to see some friends, and the man of the house came part way back with her. Now between Mitchel Troy and Monmouth there is a meadow, where it is said they began to build Troy House, but what was built up