reader will find several examples of such stories in Principal Rhys’s collection of Welsh and Manx folk-lore.  In Irish legend one of the most classical of these stories is that of the betrothal of Etain, a story which has several points of contact with the narrative of the meeting of Pwyll and Rhiannon in the Welsh Mabinogi.  The name of Arthur’s wife, Gwenhwyfar, which means ‘the White Spectre,’ also suggests that originally she too played a part in a story of the same kind.  In all these and similar narratives, it is important to note the way in which the Celtic conceptions of the other-world, in Britain and in Ireland, have been coloured by the geographical aspects of these two countries, by their seas, their islands, their caves, their mounds, their lakes, and their mountains.  The local other-worlds of these lands bear, as we might have expected, the clear impress of their origin.  On the whole the conceptions of the other-world which we meet in Celtic legend are joyous; it is a land of youth and beauty.  Cuchulainn, the Irish hero, for example, is brought in a boat to an exceedingly fair island round which there is a silver wall and a bronze palisade.  In one Welsh legend the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn has around it a rim of pearls.  One Irish story has a naive description of the glories of the Celtic Elysium in the words—­’Admirable was that land:  there are three trees there always bearing fruit, one pig always alive, and another ready cooked.’  Occasionally, however, we find a different picture.  In the Welsh poem called ‘Y Gododin’ the poet Aneirin is represented as expressing his gratitude at being rescued by the son of Llywarch Hen from ’the cruel prison of the earth, from the abode of death, from the loveless land.’  The salient features, therefore, of the Celtic conceptions of the other-world are their consonance with the suggestions made by Celtic scenery to the Celtic imagination, the vagueness and variability of these conceptions in different minds and in different moods, the absence of any ethical considerations beyond the incentive given to bravery by the thought of immortality, and the remarkable development of a sense of possible inter-relations between the two worlds, whether pacific or hostile.  Such conceptions, as we see from Celtic legend, proved an admirable stimulus and provided excellent material for the development of Celtic narrative, and the weird and romantic effect was further heightened by the general belief in the possibilities of magic and metamorphosis.  Moreover, the association with innumerable place-names of legends of this type gave the beautiful scenery of Celtic lands an added charm, which has attached their inhabitants to them with a subtle and unconquerable attachment scarcely intelligible to the more prosaic inhabitants of prosaic lands.  To the poetic Celt the love of country tends to become almost a religion.  The Celtic mind cannot remain indifferent to lands and seas whose very beauty compels the eyes of man to gaze upon them