After Harries' death his "magic books" were sold, and are now in the possession of the Registrar of the Welsh University College at Aberystwith.
Mention of Llandovery reminds me of a celebrated "Curse story" connected with Cardiganshire, but which has been so often the theme of abler pens than mine that I shall do little more than refer to it here. Briefly it is this. In the seventeenth century, Maesyfelin Hall, a large house some few miles from Lampeter, was the centre of hospitality and culture in Cardiganshire. Judge Marmaduke Lloyd, owner of the house and great estates, was universally known and respected in South Wales, counting among his intimate friends the well-known Vicar Pritchard of Llandovery, whose book, "Canwyll y Cymru" (The Welshman's Candle), is still much prized for its quaintly pious teaching by all religious Welsh people. This clergyman had a son, Samuel, who seems to have been a frequent and welcome visitor at Maesyfelin, until a day came when a terrible tragedy occurred. The young man's body, bearing evidence that he had been foully done to death, was found floating in the river Teify, and dark must have been the suspicions of his grief-stricken parent when he could pen words such as the following, fraught with deadly enmity towards his former friends:
"The curse of God on Maesyfelin fall, On root of every tree, on stone of wall, Because the flower of fair Llandovery town, Was headlong cast in Teivi's flood to drown."
"Melldith Duw ar Maesyfelin Ar bob carreg, dan bob gwreiddyn, Am daflu blodeu tref Llandyfri Ar ei ben i Deifi i foddi."
Tradition asserts that Samuel Pritchard met his death in some brawl arising from the discovery of his persistence in some prohibited love affair; but the whole story rests on the most slender evidence, and beyond the fact that he lost his life by violence, somewhere between Lampeter and Llandovery, there is nothing to prove that the family of Maesyfelin had any share at all in the dark deed. However, not many generations passed before it seemed as if the Vicar's words had indeed taken effect, for after Sir Marmaduke's death, the estate of Maesyfelin was gradually weakened by the extravagance of his descendants, and finally what was left of the land passed through marriage into the possession of the Lloyds of Peterwell in the year 1750. Maesyfelin Hall was left empty, and time and neglect have most literally fulfilled to the letter the curse pronounced by Vicar Pritchard nearly three hundred years ago. Not an unusual history, and one that might probably be true of many an old and extinct family in Great Britain. But in Cardiganshire the reverses and final extinction of the Lloyds of Maesyfelin were always ascribed to the effect of the pious Vicar's malison. Oddly enough, that curse seemed to follow the name of Lloyd, for the family of Peterwell had no better luck with the Maesyfelin estates than the original owners. At the death of John Lloyd of Peterwell, his great property, including Maesyfelin, went to his brother Herbert, who was made a baronet in 1763, and sat in Parliament for seven years. He was a man of extravagant tastes and imperious temper, and seems to have ruled like a dictator in his own neighbourhood. Many and interesting are the tales still told of him and his ways, and the manner of his death and burial were as sensational as his career through life might lead one to expect. But all that is "another story," and here it is sufficient to say that, Sir Herbert Lloyd dying deeply in debt and without descendants, his heavily mortgaged lands passed to strangers and were divided, while his great house of Peterwell, with its "four gilded domes," became, like Maesyfelin, a ruin, of which only the broken walls remain to tell of former splendours. And the famous curse, having fulfilled its end, is now forgotten, or remembered in the district only as an interesting tradition.
