romancer could make his hero right a wrong. On the other hand, the Knight of the Fountain taking possession of his brother's kingdom is to be regarded as a version of the disinheritance of the Dagda by his son the Mac Óc; and the story comes pretty near a Welsh one, the hero of which is called Pwyll, who is made, as related in the Mabinogion,[1] to rid Arawn Head of Hades of a troublesome neighbour. This last would seem practically analogous to the Knight of the Fountain in the Irish story, and he bore the name Havgan or Summer-white, which may be viewed as a corroboration of the conjecture here offered. In the tree and the sacred spring one cannot help recognizing an early specimen of the holy wells still so numerous in Ireland; and as to the richly adorned horn, which in the story of Diarmait takes the place of the silver tankard in that of Owein, we have a reference to the custom of providing wells, probably only holy ones, with vessels mentioned in Cormac's Glossary. From an article there devoted to the word ána,[2] we learn that it was the name for small vessels at the wells under 'the strict laws,' that they were most usually of silver and intended for the weary to drink from, and that they served the kings of the country as a test of the respect in which the law of the land was held. This allusion to the weary drinking and the kings testing their subjects dates probably from a time when the original signification of the vessels had been forgotten: it was doubtless of a religious nature.
The circle of pillar-stones in the sacred island invaded
