XIV.

The wide prevalence of some form of water-worship among Aryan peoples is a fact of great significance. Superstitions in connection with British wells are generally traceable to a Druidic origin. The worship of natural objects in which the British Druids indulged, particularly as regards rivers and fountains, probably had a connection with traditions of the flood. When the early Christian preachers and teachers encountered such superstitions among the people, they carefully avoided giving unnecessary offence by scoffing at them; on the contrary they preferred to adopt them, and to hallow them by giving them Christian meanings. They utilized the old Druidic circles as places of worship, chose young priests from among the educated Druids, and consecrated to their own saints the mystic wells and fountains. In this manner were continued practices the most ancient. As time passed on, other wells were similarly sanctified, as the new religion spread and parish churches were built. Disease and wickedness being intimately associated in the popular mind--epileptics and like sufferers being held to be possessed of devils, and even such vulgar ills as warts and wens being considered direct results of some evil deed, suffered or performed--so the waters of Christian baptism which cleansed from sin, cleansed also from disease. Ultimately the virtue of the waters came to be among the vulgar a thing apart from the rite of baptism; the good was looked upon as dwelling in the waters themselves, and the Christian rite as not necessarily an element in the work of regeneration. The reader who will recall what has been said in the chapter on changelings, in the first part of this volume, will perceive a survival of the ancient creed herein, in the notion that baptism is a preventive of fairy babe-thievery. Remembering that the changeling notion is in reality nothing but a fanciful way of accounting for the emaciation, ugliness, idiocy, bad temper--in a word, the illness--of the child, it will be seen that the rite of baptism, by curing the first manifestations of evil in the child's system, was the orthodox means of preventing the fairies from working their bad will on the poor innocent.

## CHAPTER III.

Personal Attributes of Legendary Welsh Stones--Stone Worship--Canna's Stone Chair--Miraculous Removals of Stones--The Walking Stone of Eitheinn--The Thigh Stone--The Talking Stone in Pembrokeshire--The Expanding Stone--Magic Stones in the 'Mabinogion'--The Stone of Invisibility--The Stone of Remembrance--Stone Thief-catchers--Stones of Healing--Stones at Cross-roads--Memorials of King Arthur--Round Tables, Carns, Pots, etc.--Arthur's Quoits--The Gigantic Rock-tossers of Old--Mol Walbec and the Pebble in her Shoe--The Giant of Trichrug--Giants and the Mythology of the Heavens--The Legend of Rhitta Gawr.