thought of the afanc, a creature which
some have supposed to be the harmless and industrious beaver, others the
frightful and destructive crocodile. I wondered whether the afanc was
the crocodile or the beaver, and speedily had no doubt that the name was
originally applied to the crocodile.

"'O, who can doubt,' thought I, 'that the word was originally intended
for something monstrous and horrible? Is there not something horrible in
the look and sound of the word afanc, something connected with the
opening and shutting of immense jaws, and the swallowing of writhing
prey? Is not the word a fitting brother of the Arabic timsah, denoting
the dread horny lizard of the waters? Moreover, have we not the voice of
tradition that the afanc was something monstrous? Does it not say that
Hu the Mighty, the inventor of husbandry, who brought the Cumry from the
summer-country, drew the old afanc out of the lake of lakes with his four
gigantic oxen? Would he have had recourse to them to draw out the little
harmless beaver? O, surely not. Yet have I no doubt that, when the
crocodile had disappeared from the lands where the Cumric language was
spoken, the name afanc was applied to the beaver, probably his successor
in the pool; the beaver now called in Cumric Llostlydan, or the broad-
tailed, for tradition's voice is strong that the beaver has at one time
been called the afanc.' Then I wondered whether the pool before me had
been the haunt of the afanc, considered both as crocodile and beaver. I
saw no reason to suppose that it had not. 'If crocodiles,' thought I,
'ever existed in Britain, and who shall say they have not? seeing that
their remains have been discovered, why should they not have haunted this
pool? If beavers ever existed in Britain, and do not tradition and
Giraldus say that they have? why should they not have existed in this
pool?

"'At a time almost inconceivably remote, when the hills around were
covered with woods, through which the elk and the bison and the wild cow
strolled, when men were rare throughout the lands, and unlike in most
things to the present race--at such a period--and such a period there has
been--I can easily conceive that the afanc-crocodile haunted this pool,
and that when the elk or bison or wild cow came to drink of its waters,
the grim beast would occasionally rush forth, and seizing his bellowing
victim, would return with it to the deeps before me to luxuriate at his
ease upon it