Beddgelert is visited annually by a crowd of tourists, who drop a tear on the grave of Llewelyn’s faithful hound. Who Celer was, who has given a name to the place, is not known. Llewelyn may have had a dog called Kill-hart, as we shall see presently, that was true and dear to him, and the beast may have been buried here--that is possible enough; but the story of the death of Gelert, killed by his master in mistake, is not true--it is an importation. The full legend as connected with Beddgelert appears first of all in Jones’s _Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards_ (ed. 1794, p. 75) about a dog, Cylart, at Beddgelert. Then came Spencer’s poem, _Beth-Gelert, or the Grave of the Greyhound_, which was first printed privately as a broadsheet in 1800, when it was composed. He says: “The story of this ballad is traditionary in a village at the foot of Snowdon, where Llewelyn the Great had a house. The greyhound named Gelert was given him by his father-in-law, King John, in the year 1205.” This is taken straight out of the note of Jones, date and all. We may well inquire what was Jones’s authority. The legend had found its way into Wales at least in the sixteenth century, for there is an _englyn_, in a MS. written in that century, to Llewelyn’s hound, Kilhart, “when it was buried at Beddgelert”; and the legend occurs as one of the pseudonymous _Allegories_, or _Fables of Catwg Ddoeth_, in the Iolo MSS., written about the same century, and, as all the other documents there, in the South Welsh dialect. It is there entitled, “The Man who killed his Greyhound.” It is therein connected with a man “who formerly lived at Abergarwan.” The tale--infant in cradle, a greyhound, a wolf--is given complete, and one of the popular sayings it gave currency to--“As sorry as the man who killed his greyhound”--is found in most collections of Welsh proverbs. As to the allegories of Catwg Ddoeth, the collection was itself an importation from the popular mediæval volume _The Sayings of Cato the Wise_, and it was foisted on S. Cadog of Llancarfan. [Illustration: BEDDGELERT] With respect to the grave of the greyhound at Beddgelert, Professor Rhys says that there are still alive old men there who remember and can testify to having seen the cairn erected by the landlord of the Goat Inn. We have, then, the story traced so far. It was brought into Wales in one of the popular collections of tales that circulated in the Middle Ages; then it was applied to some man, nameless, at Abergarwan, in South Wales. Then it attached itself to Llewelyn; Jones took the _englyn_, invented the date and the fable that it was presented by King John to Llewelyn. Next, Spencer composed the ballad which at once became popular, and finally the innkeeper at Beddgelert manufactured the grave of the dog. But let us go a little further back, and track the still earlier history of the tale.