CHAPTER II.

IT wanted two hours to sunset on the next day, and the maiden was weeping over her distaff, with her face buried in her hands, when she heard a low tap at the window by her side, and, looking up, beheld the wellknown face of her lover staring in at the pane. So fearful and so altered was his gaze that she cried for help, and as her father rushed in from an adjoining room, the face again disappeared. He started when she told him of what she believed to be an apparition, and, with a frown of rage and fiendish gesticulation, he soon afterwards left the house. It was half an hour later, as it afterwards ap

peared when these points were put together, that Owen was seen by a village boy who was tending some goats on a hill near the mine. He carried a small crowbar in his hand, walked at a rapid pace towards the working, and was then seen no more.

It was the day after, when, in consequence of the statement of the boy and Myrannwy to the anxious inquiries of old Howell, that one party of villagers set off in the direction of St. George's Well, and another to the level of the copper-mine in the mountains. They took with them matches and torches, for the winding passages had already been pushed some hundred yards in search of metal. Entering hastily, with a nervous anxiety, not unmingled with superstition, the foremost man stumbled upon something on which he had put his foot. He stooped down to pick it up; it was an open clasp-knife. "Hugh Fwyall's," said one of the miners, holding his torch to it; "I know it by that notched handle;" and, thrusting it into his pocket, they hurried on.

They had reached the last winding but one, when their leader, suddenly uttering a shrill exclamation of horror and wonder, rushed forward-It was the body of Owen Glas, quite cold and stiff. A mass of rock resting upon his temple, and crushing his fair features to a shapeless mass, disclosed the cause of death. In one cold hand he still clenched a crowbar; by his side lay an extinct torch, and a tin of the coarse powder used in blasting. With an outburst of exclamations at a death so horrid and so untimely, and with muttered allusions to the curse of the Wellwhich seemed to have fallen upon him who uttered it—they hastily constructed a rude bier of birchen boughs, and covering Owen's face, to hide the traces of so frightful a death, they bore him to that house he had left in such hot and sinful anger.

The crowds that met the sad procession had already borne the news to every house. Fwyall, with his brow still lowering, but wearing a decent sorrow, came forth to meet the

corpse, and to thank the bearers for their pious care.

None may tell the agony of Myrannwy. Believing now confidently that she had really seen the spirit of her lover, she fell into a succession of swoons, that seemed almost to promise that death should unite those who through life had been as one. She did not,

indeed, long survive him.

CHAPTER III.

FIVE days had elapsed since the finding of the body, and the people were assembling about sunset round the door of the "Ty Corph," or "Corpse's House," to take part in the ceremony called by the Welsh themselves "gwylaos," which, although tinctured with a deeper tone of solemnity, resembles in all its salient points the wilder Irish "lykewake."

The door was constantly opening for the egress and ingress of the nearer friends of the deceased, for the farmers who stole in to drop a word of comfort to Fwyall, or for the matrons and whitecheeked maidens, to soothe, if they could