ANOTHER LADY OF THE LAKE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12663, 17 September 1904, Page 5 (Supplement)

ANOTHER LADY OF THE LAKE.

The variants of the Lady of the Lake Legends are more numerous than most of us realise, but none of these stories is more delicately tinged with Celtic fantasy than that if the Maiden of the Lyny Van Vach, or the smaller Van Pool, in Carmarthenshire, recently brought into public notice by the sad death of a boy who was lost on the Black Mountains while on a fishing expedition to the Van Pools. The story tells how a young farmer sees the lake maiden one day sitting by the pool, and at once falls in love with her. His first impulse is to offer her some of his barley bread. But she returns to the water and disappears, saying his bread is too hard for her. Returning home he consults his mother, who provides him with unbaked barley dough to offer the maiden. This also she declines, but in the end she is won by some fresh-baked cakes. She marries the young farmer, with the understanding that if he shall ever give her three blows she shall leave him. She brings for her dower store of cattle and sheep out of the lake. They live very happily, and children are born to them. But one day, when they are bound for a christening party, he strike? her playfully with one of her gloves. She at once warns him that that is the first blow. And, again, some time later, at a wedding, the Lady of the Lake bursts into tears, and he taps her on the shoulder to ask her why she weeps when everyone else is gay. "Because they are entering upon trouble," she says, and warns him that he has given her the second blow. The third blow follows at a funeral, when she has burst into laughter amid the mourning—as she says, "Because at this third and last blow she starts off, and calls in all her cattle and sheep bred from the lake creatures; even the oxen at the plough obey her call, and drag the plough after them. Herewith she bid? her husband farewell for ever, and returns to th* Van Pools. But it seems she still felt some pity for the human race she had married into. She returned at once to bequeath to two of her sons the secrets of the herbs and their healing powers, and they became the fairy doctors known as the Physicians of Myddfai, whose descendants still live in the neigh-bourhood.Scottish-Am ercan.