Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/354

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338
IV. THE CULTURE HERO.

favour the desirability of keeping them with those which they otherwise most closely resemble, and of facilitating reference to them later as occasion may arise. One may begin with the story of Pwyỻ Prince of Dyved, otherwise known as Pwyỻ Head of Hades, who has hitherto been treated exclusively in the latter capacity. He forms the subject of one of our Welsh stories,[1] but it is too long to be reproduced here word for word. The following extract will suffice for the present purpose. Pwyỻ set out one day from his court at Arberth, near the Teivi, to hunt in the valley of the Cûch, a tributary of the Teivi, which divides Pembrokeshire from Carmarthenshire. When the morning of the following clay was still young, the horn was blown and the dogs were let loose under the wood which filled the Cûch valley, and Pwyỻ, following after them, soon found himself separated from his friends. Presently he heard a pack that was not his coming towards him, and just as his own dogs were reaching an open place in the forest, he beheld a stag before the strange pack, and they met him, and in passing threw him down. After he had got on his feet again and wondered for an instant at the colour of the hounds that had just gone past, he went after them, and came up with them just as they had killed the stag. He then proceeded to drive them away, and to lure his own dogs to the stag; but whilst he was thus engaged, the owner of the strange pack arrived on a big horse of a dismal grey colour: he had a huntsman's horn hanging from his neck, and he was clad in a hunting-dress of a kind of grey cloth. 'Ah, prince,' said he, 'I know who thou

  1. R. B. Mab. pp. 1—25; Guest, iij. 37—71.