There lay the lake in the low bottom, surrounded by the heathery hillocks; there it lay quite still, the hot sun reflected upon its surface, which shone like a polished blue shield.  Near the shore it was shallow, at least near that shore upon which I lay.  But farther on, my eye, practised in deciding upon the depths of waters, saw reason to suppose that its depth was very great.  As I gazed upon it my mind indulged in strange musings.  I thought of the afanc, a creature which some have supposed to be the harmless and industrious beaver, others the frightful and destructive crocodile.  I wondered whether the afanc was the crocodile or the beaver, and speedily had no doubt that the name was originally applied to the crocodile.

‘Oh, who can doubt,’ thought I, ’that the word was originally intended for something monstrous and horrible?  Is there not something horrible in the look and sound of the word afanc, something connected with the opening and shutting of immense jaws, and the swallowing of writhing prey?  Is not the word a fitting brother of the Arabic timsah, denoting the dread horny lizard of the waters?  Moreover, have we not the voice of tradition that the afanc was something monstrous?  Does it not say that Hu the Mighty, the inventor of husbandry, who brought the Cumry from the summer-country, drew the old afanc out of the lake of lakes with his four gigantic oxen?  Would he have had recourse to them to draw out the little harmless beaver?  Oh, surely not.  Yet have I no doubt that when the crocodile had disappeared from the lands, where the Cumric language was spoken, the name afanc was applied to the beaver, probably his successor in the pool, the beaver now called in Cumric Llostlydan, or the broad-tailed, for tradition’s voice is strong that the beaver has at one time been called the afanc.’  Then I wondered whether the pool before me had been the haunt of the afanc, considered both as crocodile and beaver.  I saw no reason to suppose that it had not.  ‘If crocodiles,’ thought I, ’ever existed in Britain, and who shall say that they have not, seeing that their remains have been discovered, why should they not have haunted this pool?  If beavers ever existed in Britain, and do not tradition and Giraldus say that they have, why should they not have existed in this pool?

’At a time almost inconceivably remote, when the hills around were covered with woods, through which the elk and the bison and the wild cow strolled, when men were rare throughout the lands and unlike in most things to the present race—­at such a period—­and such a period there has been—­I can easily conceive that the afanc-crocodile haunted this pool, and that when the elk or bison or wild cow came to drink of its waters the grim beast would occasionally rush forth, and seizing his bellowing victim, would return with it to the deeps before me to luxuriate at his ease upon its flesh.  And at a time less remote, when the crocodile was no more,