Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/149

Rh most interesting of all, perhaps, because the most palpably a nymph or goddess of the well, is the Green Lady who "appeared beside the eye-well in Marcross, near St. Donat's, and watched people carefully as they deposited rags on the thorn-bushes around the well" (p. 204). Unlike the heroines of parallel traditions in Germany and England, these ladies are described not only as white, but as black, grey, or green, according to the colour of their clothing. The Celtic love of colour appears all through these stories of apparitions: the Ceffyl Dwr may be grey, white, piebald, or chestnut; the Cwn Annwn black with red spots, or vice versa, blood-red, black, brown with white ears, or even white with ears "rose-coloured inside," but, whatever it be, the colour is nearly always mentioned.

The Vampire belief, unknown, to the best of my knowledge, in England, flourishes in Wales. The vampire is supposed to be a person who after death has gone neither to Heaven nor Hell, but has joined the Wild Hunt, and the curious feature about it is that the superstition is attached not only to the dead man, but to the furniture which belonged to him. One story goes that whoever slept in a certain ancient four-post bedstead was attacked in the night by a blood-sucking demon. In two other cases the vampire is an old carved oak chair itself, apparently. Nothing is seen, but the occupant of the chair finds his hand scratched and bleeding. Not even ministers of religion were exempt from the attacks of one such vampire chair (p. 56)! Mr. Hartland (p. x.) confesses himself unable to cite an exact parallel to this weird and "creepy" story.

The people of Wales are much to be congratulated on the acquisition of this valuable work, "as full of matter as an egg is of meat,"—to use an appropriate folk-saying. With this, and the further volume which Mrs. Trevelyan leads us to hope for, added to Principal Rhys's Celtic Folklore, the Rev. Elias Owen's Welsh Folklore, and the promised work by Mr. J. Ceredig-Davies, we only want a series of "Choice Notes" reprinted from Byegones, and a carefully detailed account of the whole folklore of "Little England beyond Wales" to have a very fairly complete record of the folklore of the Principality.