Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/179

 Collectanea.

169

About a mile east of Berrievv, on the green by the side of a lane, is a stone about five feet high, called, on the Ordnance Map, Maen Beuno, but by the people in the neighbourhood "the Bynion Stone." A man who told me (in iSgi) that he was fifty years of age, said he had been told by old men when he was a boy that it was intended to have built a church on the spot where the Bynion Stone stands, but that every night the stones which had been placed in position were carried away and put down on the spot where Berriew Church now stands. (1891.)

September 7 th, 1891, I saw a funeral at Festiniog. The funeral procession was headed by a row of young men ; next to these was a row of young v/omen ; then a row of little girls ; then a row of boys ; these were all dressed (apparently in their Sunday clothes) in colours. They all carried books, which contained words without music. After these came the coffin, carried on a bier by six men, not professional undertakers (there was no sign of an undertaker present), but apparently friends of the deceased's family. Then came the mourners, and aside and at back of them a crowd of some two hundred, mostly females, and all, or nearly all, dressed in black or in dark colours. These had all assembled in front of the house where the corpse was, and as soon as the bier was raised on the shoulders of its bearers, the young people in front sang from the books which they carried, and, at the same time, the procession started. The air to which they sang was somewhat as follows. I write from a very hazy memory of it, but the following is a record of some resemblance to it :


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This was sung several times, until the churchyard gate was reached, when the singing immediately ceased. Here the priest,