, would induce the old man to speak. It did; and the
speech was an invitation--nay, rather a command--to spend the remainder
of the festival with him in the churchyard. The priest, again consulted,
advised compliance; and the man went trembling to the tryst. He found
in the churchyard a great house, brilliantly illuminated, where he
enjoyed himself, eating, drinking, piping and dancing. After what seemed
the lapse of a few hours, the grey master of the house came to him, and
bade him hasten home, or his wife would be married to another; and in
parting he advised him always to respect the remains of the dead.
Scarcely had he done speaking when the grey old man himself, the guests,
the house, and all that it contained, vanished, leaving the man to crawl
home alone in the moonlight as best he might after so long a debauch.
For he had been absent a year and a day; and when he got home he found
his wife in a bride's dress, and the whole house gay with a bridal
party. His entrance broke in upon the mirth: his wife swooned, and the
new bridegroom scrambled up the chimney. But when she got over her
fright, and her husband had recovered from the fatigue of his year-long
dance, they made it up, and lived happily ever after.[127]

A story of this type has been elaborated by a Welsh writer who is known
as "Glasynys" into a little romance, in which the hero is a shepherd
lad, and the heroine a fairy maiden whom he weds and brings home with
him. This need not detain us; but a more authentic story from the Vale
of Neath may be mentioned. It concerns a boy called Gitto Bach, or
Little Griffith, a farmer's son, who disappeared. During two whole years
nothing was heard of him; but at length one morning when his mother, who
had long and bitterly mourned for him as dead, opened the door, whom
should she see sitting on the threshold but Gitto with a bundle under
his arm. He was dressed and looked exactly as when she last saw him, for
he had not grown a bit. "Where have you been all this time?" asked his
mother. "Why, it was only yesterday I went away," he replied; and
opening the bundle, he showed her a dress the "little children," as he
called them, had given him for dancing with them. The dress was of white
paper without seam. With maternal caution she put it into the fire.[128]

I am not aware of many foreign examples of this type; but among the
Siberian Tartars their extravagant heroes sometimes feast overlong with
friends as mythical a