"How do you know that?" asked the princess, "have you anointed your eyes with the ointment?" And in the flash of an eyelid she leapt from her couch, and striking one hand with the other, she blew on the nurse's eyes, which immediately lost sight of the enchanted surroundings, and though she tried hard in future days, nevermore did she see the princess, or any of the fair family or their doings.
And so, without knowing how, she found herself by her own fireside at home, just as usual, and that was the last of her stories about the Tylwyth Teg. And I also leave them here, for though I could add other stories to these I have noted, I have written enough about them now. I knew the old woman who told this story, and she always insisted she was the grandchild of the fairies' nurse, and, moreover, was very proud of the fact, and not without cause either.
I should have mentioned earlier that in translating Mr. Lledrod Davies' tales, I have left the names of places exactly as he had them. Where they are filled in they are the real ones, several of them places I know. It will be noticed that he often makes use of the expression "Teify-side." Now that name we generally apply to the district of the lower Teify, lying more or less between the towns of Llandyssil and Cardigan. But from what Mr. Davies says, he evidently includes in this term all the upper valley of the Teify too, which rises in the hills not many miles away from his native village, and most of his stories are located more or less in that neighbourhood. It is, or was until late years, a remote and lonely district, backed by the wild moors of the Ellineth Mountains, that to this day look as if they might be the last refuge of all the fairies, ghosts, and goblins of Wales. With these mountain wastes behind, and the gloomy stretch of the great Tregaron bog before them, is it any wonder that the imaginative Celtic inhabitants of Pontrhydyfendigaid and the surrounding hamlets saw, and wished to see, evidences of the supernatural in almost every unimportant coincidence? To them it came natural to believe in those
"Faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side, Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress."