_A Boy's Visit to the 'Tylwyth Teg's' King._--'About eighty years ago, at Tynylone, my grandfather told me this story: "A boy ten years old was often whipped and cruelly treated by his schoolmaster because he could not say his lessons very well. So one day he ran away from school and went to a river-side, where some little folk came to him and asked why he was crying. He told them the master had punished him; and on hearing this they said, 'Oh! if you will stay with us it will not be necessary for you to go to school. We will keep you as long as you like.' Then they took him under the water and over the water into a cave underground, which opened into a great palace where the _Tylwyth Teg_ were playing games with golden balls, in rings like those in which they dance and sing. The boy had been taken to the king's family, and he began to play with the king's sons. After he had been there in the palace in the full enjoyment of all its pleasures he wished very much to return to his mother and show her the golden ball which the _Tylwyth Teg_ gave him. And so he took the ball in his pocket and hurried through the cave the way he had come; but at the end of it and by the river two of the _Tylwyth Teg_ met him, and taking the ball away from him they pushed him into the water, and through the water he found his way home. He told his mother how he had been away for a fortnight, as he thought, but she told him it had been for two years. Though the boy often tried to find the way back to the _Tylwyth Teg_ he never could. Finally, he went back to school, and became a most wonderful scholar and parson."'[54] IN MERLIN'S COUNTRY; AND A VICAR'S TESTIMONY The Rev. T. M. Morgan, vicar of Newchurch parish, two miles from Carmarthen, has made a very careful study of the folk-traditions in his own parish and in other regions of Carmarthenshire, and is able to offer us evidence of the highest value, as follows:--[55] _'Tylwyth Teg' Power over Children._--'The _Tylwyth Teg_ were thought to be able to take children. "You mind, or the _Tylwyth Teg_ will take you away," parents would say to keep their children in the house after dark. It was an opinion, too, that the _Tylwyth Teg_ could transform good children into kings and queens, and bad children into wicked spirits, after such children had been _taken_--perhaps in death. The _Tylwyth Teg_ were believed to live in some invisible world to which children on dying might go to be rewarded or punished, according to their behaviour on this earth. Even in this life the _Tylwyth Teg_ had power over children for good or evil. The belief, as these ideas show, was that the _Tylwyth Teg_ were spirits.'