Page:My people stories of the peasantry of West Wales.djvu/144



killed for him a chicken and laid it before him. Gwylim was crafty and charged himself falsely, saying: “An old rascal am I to bring this upon you;” therefore Old Silah murmured in his hearing this lullaby: “Pity such a concubine snared you, little Gwylim, my son bach.” Old Silah’s lullaby lodged itself in Gwylim’s brain; and drank he never so deep nor got he never so muddled, he remembered it always. It was as if the words were the first words he had been taught to utter.

Betti ceased to visit Manteg; she rarely went out of her house. Always she was either with child or she bore some mark of her husband's savagery: often both stopped her from going abroad. In common with the women of her race constant child-bearing made her slovenly and sallow. With the birth of her fifth boy arrived her first act of humiliation: she wrote