or: he is
sometimes released voluntarily by his captors. A man who lived at
Ystradgynlais, in Brecknockshire, going out one day to look after his
cattle and sheep on the mountain, disappeared. In about three weeks,
after search had been made in vain for him and his wife had given him up
for dead, he came home. His wife asked him where he had been for the
past three weeks. "Three weeks! Is it three weeks you call three hours?"
said he. Pressed to say where he had been, he told her he had been
playing on his flute (which he usually took with him on the mountain) at
the Llorfa, a spot near the Van Pool, when he was surrounded at a
distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him
until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so
affected him that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small
cakes to eat, of which he partook; and he had never enjoyed himself so
well in his life. Near Bridgend is a place where a woman is said to have
lived who was absent ten years with the fairies, and thought she was not
out of the house more than ten minutes. With a woman's proverbial
persistency, she would not believe her husband's assurances that it was
ten years since she disappeared; and the serious disagreement between
them which ensued was so notorious that it gave a name to the place
where they lived. A happier result is believed to have attended an
adventure that foreboded much worse to a man at Dornoch, in
Sutherlandshire. He was present at a funeral in the churchyard on New
Year's Day, and was so piqued at not being invited, as all the others
were, to some of the New Year's festivities, that in his vexation,
happening to see a skull lying at his feet, he struck it with his staff
and said: "Thou seemest to be forsaken and uncared-for, like myself. I
have been bidden by none; neither have I invited any: I now invite
thee!" That night as he and his wife were sitting down alone to supper,
a venerable old man entered the room in silence and took his share of
the delicacies provided. In those days the New Year's feast was kept up
for eleven days together; and the stranger's visit was repeated in the
same absolute silence for six nights. At last the host, alarmed and
uneasy, sought the priest's advice as to how he was to get rid of his
unwelcome guest. The reverend father bade him, in laying the bannocks in
the basket for the seventh day's supper, reverse the last-baked one.
This, he declared