I.

In the traditions concerning Welsh stones, abundant personal attributes are accorded them, such as in nature belong only to animals. They were endowed with volition and with voice; they could travel from place to place without mortal aid; they would move uneasily when disturbed by human contact; they expanded and contracted at will; they clung to people who touched them with profane or guilty purpose; they possessed divers qualities which made them valuable to their possessors, such as the power of rendering them invisible, or of filling their pockets with gold. In pursuing the various accounts of these stones in Welsh folk-lore we find ourselves now in fairyland, now in the domains of mother church, now listening to legends of enchantment, now to tales of saintly virtue, now giving ear to a magician, now to a monk. Stone-worship, of which the existing superstitions are remains, was so prevalent under the Saxon monarchy, that it was forbidden by law in the reign of Edgar the Peaceable, (ninth century,) and when Canute came, in the following century, he also found it advisable to issue such a law. That this pagan worship was practised from a time of which there is now no record, is not questioned; and the perpetuation of certain features of this worship by the early Christians was in spite of the laws promulgated for its suppression by a Christian king. In this manner the monks were enabled to draw to themselves the peasantry in whose breasts the ancient superstition was strong, and who willingly substituted the new story for the old, so long as the underlying belief was not rudely uprooted.