P. 131. With the rôle of the girl in the afanc story compare that of Tegau, wife of Caradog Freichfras, on whom a serpent fastens and can only be allured away to seize on one of Tegau's breasts, of which she loses the nipple when the beast is cut off. The defect being replaced with gold, she is ever after known as Tegau Eur-fron, or 'Tegau of the golden Breast.' That is a version inferred of a story which is discussed by M. Gaston Paris in an article, on Caradoc et le Serpent, elicited by a paper published (in the November number of Modern Language Notes for 1898) by Miss C. A. Harper, of Bryn Mawr College, U.S.: see the Romania, xxviii. 214-31. One of Miss Harper's parallels, mentioned by M. Paris at p. 220, comes from Campbell: it is concerning a prince who receives from his stepmother a magic shirt which converts itself into a serpent coiled round his neck, and of which he is rid by the help of a woman acting in much the same way as Tegau. We have an echo of this in the pedigrees in the Jesus College MS. 20: see the Cymmrodor, viii. 88, where one reads of G6ga6n keneu menrud a vu neidyr vl6ydyn am y von6gyl, 'Gwgon the whelp of Menrud (?) who was a year with a snake round his neck'--his pedigree is also given. In M. Paris' suggested reconstruction of the story (p. 228) from the different versions, he represents the maiden who is to induce the serpent to leave the man on whom it has fastened, as standing in a vessel filled with milk, while the man stands in a vessel filled with vinegar. The heroine exposes herself to the reptile, which relinquishes his present victim to seize on one of the woman's breasts. Now the appropriateness of the milk is explained by the belief that snakes are inordinately fond of milk, and that belief has, I presume, a foundation in fact: at any rate I am reminded of its introduction into the plot of more than one English story, such as Stanley Weyman's book From the Memoirs of a Minister of France (London, 1895), p. 445, and A. Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London, 1893), pp. 199-209. In Wales, however, it is to a woman's milk that one's interest attaches: I submit two references which will explain what I mean. The first of them is to Owen's Welsh Folk-Lore, p. 349, where he says that 'traditions of flying snakes were once common in all parts of Wales,' and adds as follows:--'The traditional origin of these imaginary creatures was that they were snakes, which by having drunk the milk of a woman, and by having eaten of bread consecrated for the Holy Communion, became transformed into winged serpents or dragons.' The other is to the Brython for 1861, p. 190, where one reads in Welsh to the following effect:--'If a snake chances to have an opportunity to drink of a woman's milk it is certain to become a gwiber. When a woman happens to be far from her child, and her breasts are full and beginning to give her pain, she sometimes milks them on the ground in order to ease them. To this the peasantry in parts of Cardiganshire have a strong objection, lest a snake should come there and drink the milk, and so become a gwiber.' The word gwiber is used in the Welsh Bible for a viper, but the editor of the Brython explains, that in our folklore it means a huge kind of snake or dragon that has grown wings and has its body cased in hard scales: for a noted instance in point he refers the reader to the first number of the Brython, p. 3. It is believed still all over Wales that snakes may, under favourable circumstances, develop wings: in fact, an Anglesey man strongly wished, to my knowledge, to offer to the recent Welsh Land Commission, as evidence of the wild and neglected state of a certain farm, that the gorse had grown so high and the snakes so thriven in it that he had actually seen one of the latter flying right across a wide road which separated two such gorse forests as he described: surprised and hurt to find that this was not accepted, he inferred that the Commissioners knew next to nothing about their business.