hands--uttering her lamentation, as if in allusion to the relatives of
those about to die. Thus, if a man hears her cry _fy nqwsaig, fy
nqwsaig_, &c., his wife will surely die, and he will be heard to mourn
in the same strain ere long; and so on with other cases. The cadence of
this cry can never be properly caught by any one who has not heard, if
not a Cyoeraeth, at least a native of Wales, repeat the strain. When
merely an inarticulate scream is heard, it is probable that the hearer
himself is the one whose death is fore-mourned.

Sometimes she is supposed to come like the Irish _banshee_, in a dark
mist, to the windows of those who have been long ill; when flapping her
wings against the pane, she repeats their names with the same prolonged
emphasis; and then it is thought that they must die.

It is this hag who forms the torrent beds which seam the mountain side;
for she gathers great stones in her cloak to make her ballast, when she
flies upon the storm; and when about to retire to her mountain cave, she
lets them drop progressively as she moves onwards, when they fall with
such an unearthly weight that they lay open the rocky sides of the
mountain.

In some parts of South Wales this hag of the mists either loses her
sway, or divides it with a more dignified personage, who, in the form of
an old man, and under the name of _Brenhin Llwyd_, the _grey king_, sits
ever silent in the mist.

Any one who has witnessed the gathering and downward rolling of a
genuine mountain fog must fully appreciate the spirit in which men first
peopled the cloud with such supernatural beings a those above described;
or with those which dimly, yet constantly, pervade the much-admired