George Borrow tells us that when he was walking through Cardiganshire, he came one evening to a large sheet of water not far from Tregaron. He must needs find out the name of this little lake, and therefore knocked at the door of a cottage that happened to be close by, in order to ask the information. A woman opened the door, of whom Borrow seems to have asked a great many tiresome questions, after his usual habit; but this time he elicited the curious information from his victim that a fairy cow was supposed to live in the lake, a "water-cow, that used to come out at night, and eat people's clover in the fields." That odd tradition was living only sixty years ago, which is interesting to think of.
Now I have told the little I have been able to gather about the Tylwyth Teg and their ways, and so we will bid them farewell, and turn to more serious subjects.
CHAPTER VIII
WISE MEN, WITCHES, AND FAMILY CURSES
"Wizards that peep and that mutter."
When reading a provincial daily paper a few days ago, I came across the following paragraph:
"Although the school-master has been abroad in Wales for quite a long time, the belief in witchcraft still lingers here and there, and cropped up yesterday in an assault case at Aberavon, where one woman accused another of 'marking her house with a criss-cross to bewitch her.'"
It seems curious to read these words in the twentieth century, and it is hard to realise that a very few generations ago the woman who had put the "criss-cross" on her neighbour's house would have stood a very good chance of losing her life by being ducked by the mob for a witch, if indeed legal proceedings had not been taken against her.