'Strange as the advice of the wise man sounded, she resolved to try it; so she went the next day to search among the hens for one of the requisite description; but to her disappointment she failed to find one. She then walked from one farm house to another in her search; but fortune appeared to scowl at her, as she seemed to fail in her object. When, however, she was nearly disheartened, she came across the kind of hen she wanted at a farm at the end of the parish. She bought it, and after returning home she arranged the fire and killed the hen, which she placed in front of the bright fire burning on the hearth. Whilst watching the hen baking she altogether forgot the crimbil; and she fell into a sort of swoon, when she was astonished by the sound of music outside the house, similar to the music she had heard a few nights before at the cross-roads. The feathers had by this time fallen off the hen, and when she came to look for the crimbil he had disappeared. The mother cast wild looks about the house, and to her joy she heard the voice of her lost son calling to her from outside. She ran to meet him, and embraced him fervently. But when she asked him where he had been so long, he had no account in the world to give but that he had been listening to pleasant music. He was very thin and worn in appearance when he was restored. Such is the story of the Lost Child.'
Let me remark as to the urchin's exclamation concerning the cooking done in the egg-shell, that Mr. Hughes, as the result of further inquiry, has given me what he considers a more correct version; but it is no less inconsequent, as will be seen:--
Mi glywais gan fy nhad ac yntau gan ei dad, a hwnnw gan ei dad yntau, Fod mesen cyn derwen a'i phlannu mwn dár: Ni chlywais yn unman am gymysg y bastai yn masgal wy iâr.
I heard from my father and he from his father, and that one from his father, That the acorn exists before the oak and the planting of it in the ground: Never anywhere have I heard of mixing the pasty in the shell of a hen's egg.
In Dewi Glan Ffrydlas' story from the Ogwen Valley, in Carnarvonshire, p. 62 above, it is not the cooking of a pasty but the brewing of beer in an egg-shell. However what is most remarkable is that the egg-shell is similarly used in stories from other lands. Mr. Hartland cites one from Mecklenburg and another from Scandinavia. He also mentions stories in which the imp measures his own age by the number of forests which he has seen growing successively on the same soil, the formula being of the following kind: 'I have seen the Forest of Ardennes burnt seven times,' 'Seven times have I seen the wood fall in Lessö Forest,' or 'I am so old, I was already in the world before the Kamschtschen Wood (in Lithuania) was planted, wherein great trees grew, and that is now laid waste again [99].' From these and the like instances it is clear that the Welsh versions here in question are partially blurred, as the fairy child's words should have been to the effect that he was old enough to remember the oak when it was yet but an acorn; and an instance of this explicit kind is given by Howells--it comes from Llandrygarn in Anglesey--see p. 139, where his words run thus: 'I can remember yon oak an acorn, but I never saw in my life people brewing in an egg-shell before.' I may add that I have been recently fortunate enough to obtain from Mr. Llywarch Reynolds another kind of estimate of the fairy urchin's age. He writes that his mother remembers a very old Merthyr woman who used to tell the story of the egg-shell cookery, but in words differing from all the other versions known to him, thus:--