CHAPTER VWALES MONTH BY MONTH

The road ran for ten miles between mountains on which the woods of oak and fir moaned, though there was little wind. A raven croaked with a fat voice. I could hear a score of streams. But the valley would not speak with me. The sole joy in it was that of walking fast and of seeing the summits of the hills continually writing a wild legend on the cloudy sky. The road curved and let in the poor sunlight from the south-west; and there were interminable oak woods ahead,—one moan and one dull cloud.

But, suddenly, a space of the south-west sky was silver white. The sun was almost visible, and, suddenly, a company of oak trees caught the light and shone, and became warm and glorious, butmisty and impenetrable with light. They dreamed of summers to come and summers past. For one moment they were as fine and strange and chosen from all the rest, as things discovered by a lantern on a country road at night. Not only were they impenetrable to the sight, but it was impossible to suppose oneself amongst them. They were holding festival, but not for me. They were populous, but not with men. They were warm and welcoming, and something was happy there. They were as a large, distant, and luminous house seen in a cold and windy night by some one hungry, poor, timid, and old, upon a lonely road, envying it with an insatiable envy that never dreams of satisfying itself.

But, in a moment, a mist arose from the grass between the oaks and me: the glory departed: and the little, draughty farmhouse was far more to be desired than they, where a soft-voiced motherly girl of twenty gave me cheese and bread and milk, and smiled gently at the folly of walking on such a day.

SUNNY FIELD, NEAR LLANBERIS

All day I wandered over an immense, bare, snowy mountain which had looked as round as a white summer cloud, but was truly so pitted and scarred and shattered by beds of streams and valleys full of rotten oak trees, that my course wound like a river's or like a mouse's in a dense hedge. The streams were small, and, partly frozen, partly covered up by snow, they made no noise. Nothing made any noise. There was a chimney-stack clearly visible ten miles away, and I wished that I could hear the factory hiss and groan. No wind stirred among the trees. Once a kite flew over among the clouds of the colour of young swan's plumage, but silently, silently. I passed the remains of twelve ancient oaks, like the litter of some uncouth, vast monster pasturing, but without a sound.

The ruins of a farm lay at the edge of one valley: snow choked the chimney and protected the hearth, which was black with flames long dead, and as cold as a cinerary urn of the bronze age. I stumbled over something snowy near by, and exposed the brown fragments of a plough, and farther on, a heavy wheel standing askew on its crumbling axle.

The trees below were naked on one side of their boles, but above was the snow, like a stiff upright mane on every branch, which seemed to have forced them into their wild and painful curves.All the fallen rotten wood broke under my foot without a sound, and the green things disclosed were as some stupid, cheerful thing in a house of tremendous woe.

It was impossible to think of the inn to which I was going, and hardly of the one which I had left. How could their fires have survived the all-pervading silent snow? When one is comfortable, near a fire or within reach of one, and in company, winter is thought of as a time of activity, of glowing faces, of elements despised, and even a poetry book brings back the spring: one will run, or eat chestnuts, or read a book, or look at a picture to-morrow, and so the winter flies. But on the mountain there was no activity; it was impertinent: there was the snow. When I could remember anything it was these verses, which were the one survival from the world I had known before I began to cross this immense, bare, snowy mountain:

The beams flash onAnd make appear the melancholy ruinsOf cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms and spears,And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheelsOf scythéd chariots, and the emblazonryOf trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblemsOf dead destruction, ruin within ruin!The wrecks beside of many a city vast,Whose population which the earth grew overWas mortal, but not human; see, they lie,Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapesHuddled in grey annihilation, split,Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,The anatomies of unknown winged things,And fishes which were isles of living scale,And serpents, bony chains, twisted aroundThe iron crags, or within heaps of dustTo which the tortuous strength of their last pangsHad crushed the iron crags; and over theseThe jagged alligator, and the mightOf earth-convulsing behemoth, which onceWere monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,And weed-overgrown continents of earth,Increased and multiplied like summer wormsOn an abandoned corpse, till the blue globeWrapped deluge round it like a cloke, and theyYelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some GodWhose throne was in a comet, passed, and criedBe not!

The beams flash on

And make appear the melancholy ruins

Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;

Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms and spears,

And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels

Of scythéd chariots, and the emblazonry

Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,

Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems

Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!

The wrecks beside of many a city vast,

Whose population which the earth grew over

Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,

Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,

Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes

Huddled in grey annihilation, split,

Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,

The anatomies of unknown winged things,

And fishes which were isles of living scale,

And serpents, bony chains, twisted around

The iron crags, or within heaps of dust

To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs

Had crushed the iron crags; and over these

The jagged alligator, and the might

Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once

Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,

And weed-overgrown continents of earth,

Increased and multiplied like summer worms

On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe

Wrapped deluge round it like a cloke, and they

Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God

Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried

Be not!

They lay beneath; the snow was over them. It was hard to walk while all things had thus, in Asiatic phrase, perfected their repose. When the distant chimney appeared again, it was as incredible as a thing seen in a dream when one knows that it is a dream. It interrupted the perfection of the whole, as I did, but only as the smell of a mouse may spoil the beauty of an old room which has been left for a dead man alone, for some timeafter the funeral. The farther I went, the more immense became the extent of hills ahead and around. Their whiteness made the sky gloomy, as if with coming night. The furthest were grey with distance. In the cold that overtook my swiftest walking I could not put by the imagination that I could see myself travelling over more endless white hills, lost, to my own knowledge, and yet beyond my own power to save. And, again, I thought of all the hills beyond those I saw, until even the immensity before me became more awful, because it suggested the whole, as the light of one candle by the organist suggests the whole cathedral at midnight.

And then, though I did not know it, a change began, and dimly, not hopefully, as when one thinks one hears the double click of a latch in a house which strangers inhabit now, I saw that the sun began to set, and it was red. I knew that red: it belonged to the old world: it was the colour of the oast houses in Kent. A window, two miles off, caught the light and blazed. A bell told the hour in a church, and shook some of the snow from the belfry in a mist. I warmed myself in the breath of a flock of sheep. I knew that I heard the voice of a stream which had been with me for a long way. Borrow, I remembered, knew the stream. Borrow! I was at home again.

WELSH FARM, NEAR LLANBERIS

Slowly the fire and the ale constructed the world again, and though I could still see the snow from the hearth of the inn, it was as impotent as the frail moon which was convoyed down among the moorlands by dark and angry clouds, while I read—as now my reader does—this passage fromWild Wales:—

"'I suppose you follow some pursuit besides bardism?' said I; 'I suppose you farm?'

"'I do not farm,' said the man in grey. 'I keep an inn.'

"'Keep an inn?' said I.

"'Yes,' said the man in grey. 'The —— Arms at L——.'

"'Sure,' said I, 'inn-keeping and bardism are not very cognate pursuits?'

"'You are wrong,' said the man in grey; 'I believe theawen, or inspiration, is quite as much at home at the bar as in the barn, perhaps more. It is that belief which makes me tolerably satisfied with my position and prevents me from asking Sir Richard to give me a farm instead of an inn.'

"'I suppose,' said I, 'that Sir Richard is your landlord?'

"'He is,' said the man in grey, 'and a right noble landlord too.'

"'I suppose,' said I, 'that he is right proud of his tenant?'

"'He is,' said the man in grey, 'and I am right proud of my landlord, and will here drink his health. I have often said that if I were not what I am, I should wish to be Sir Richard.'

"'You consider yourself his superior?' said I.

SNOWDON FROM CWM-Y-GLO

"'Of course,' said the man in grey; 'a baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard, you know. I never forget what I am, and the respect due to my sublime calling. About a month ago I was seated in an upper apartment, in a fit of rapture; there was a pen in my hand and paper before me on the table, and likewise a jug of good ale, for I always find that theawenis most prodigal of her favours when a jug of good ale is before me. All of a sudden my wife came running up and told me that Sir Richard was below, and wanted to speak to me. "Tell him to walk up," said I. "Are you mad?" said my wife. "Do you know who Sir Richard is?" "I do," said I; "a baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard. Tell him to walk up." Well, my wife went and told Sir Richard that I was writing and could not come down, and that she hoped he would not object to walk up. "Certainly not, certainly not," said Sir Richard. "I shall be only too happy to ascend to a genius on his hill. You may be proud of such a husband, Mrs. W." And here it will be as well to tell you that my name is W.—J. W. of ——. Sir Richard then came up, and I received him with gravity and politeness. I did not rise, of course, for I never forget myself a moment, but I told him to sit down, and added, that after I had finished thepennill(song for the harp) I was engaged upon, I would speak to him. Well, Sir Richard smiled and sat down, and begged me not to hurry myself, for that he could wait. So I finished thepennill, deliberately, mind you, for I did not forget who I was, and then turning to Sir Richard, entered upon business with him.'

"'I suppose Sir Richard is a very good-tempered man?' said I.

"'I don't know,' said the man in grey. 'I have seen Sir Richard in a devil of a passion, but never with me. No, no! trust Sir Richard for not riding the high horse with me. A baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard, and that Sir Richard knows.'"

The which Borrovianism should as much delightmy hard-working reader as it did me, on that January night: may it console him also.

I passed through a village where I found that the old-fashioned bidding marriage was not dead. For a printed sheet with this announcement (in Welsh) fell into my hands:

A Bidding to a MarriageInasmuch as we intend entering thestate of wedlock on ——, we invitewedding gifts, which will be repaidwith thanks on a like occasion.T. Williams.Elizabeth Jones.It is expected that gifts due to them,and to their parents and brothers,will be paid on the wedding day.

A Bidding to a Marriage

Inasmuch as we intend entering thestate of wedlock on ——, we invitewedding gifts, which will be repaidwith thanks on a like occasion.T. Williams.Elizabeth Jones.It is expected that gifts due to them,and to their parents and brothers,will be paid on the wedding day.

Inasmuch as we intend entering the

state of wedlock on ——, we invite

wedding gifts, which will be repaid

with thanks on a like occasion.

T. Williams.

Elizabeth Jones.

It is expected that gifts due to them,

and to their parents and brothers,

will be paid on the wedding day.

SNOWDON FROM LLANBERIS LAKE

The custom was old; the village was new, and it stood on the edge of a strange new land. Having passed it, the road dipped among sublime black hills of refuse from furnace and pit. The streams were rich with yellow water, purple water. Here and there were dim, shining, poisonous heaps of green and blue, like precious stones. There were railway lines everywhere, and on them trucks, full of scraps of metal, like sheaves of scimitars and other cruel weapons—still cruel, but hacked, often rusty, and expressing something more horrible than mere sharpness and ferocity. There were furnaces, crimson and gold; and beyond all, a white-clouded sky which said that it was over the sea.

In the early afternoon a grey mist invested all things, so that even when I was close to them, they seemed about to pass away, and I was tempted to walk regardless and straight ahead as the harper did in the tale.

It is told that a harper was asked to play and sing at a wedding. It was a fine day, and on his way he sometimes played over the melodies he most liked; and as he went, the fairies followed him, their little feet going fast and sharp like drumsticks. When he reached the house, the fairies were still behind him. They followed him in, and presently, since he again tuned his harp, the company began to dance, and the fairies with them; the house, which was a little one, did not impede them; and in no long time they all went dancing out of the house. The fairies, it is said, were not to bedistinguished from the bridal party. They went on across well-known country, regardless and straight ahead, through a barn where men were threshing, through a hall where men were dining. Coming at last to a place he did not know, the harper ceased and became separated from the rest, and slept. When he awoke, he found himself in a pleasant place among very little people, and all that was asked of him was that he should play on the harp every night. Then one day he got leave to go out of the land of the fairies; but he left his harp there and could never get back again. He found that the others had returned. He could say nothing of the wedding day, except that he had never before harped so well.

And well did the mist harp. It was the one real credible thing among those furnaces, which were but as gaps in it, or as landscapes seen rapidly from small windows in a lofty house upon a hill.

SNOWDON FROM TRAETH MAWR

Next day I crossed the river. At first, the water seemed as calm and still as ice. The boats at anchor, and doubled by shadow, were as if by miracle suspended in the water. No ripple was to be seen, though now and then one emitted a sudden transitory flame, reflected from the sun, which dreamed half-way up the sky in a cocoon of cloud. No motion of the tide was visible, though the shadows of the bridge that cleared the river in three long leaps, trembled and were ever about to pass away. The end of the last leap was unseen, for the further shore was lost in mist, and a solitary gull spoke for the mist. A sombre, satanic family of what had yesterday been the chimneys of factories rose out of the mist,—belonging to a remote, unexplored, inaccessible country over there, which seemed to threaten the river-side where I stood. But the tide was rising, and the thin long wavering line of water grew up over the mud, and died, and grew up again, curved like the grain of a chestnut or mother-of-pearl, and fascinating, persuasive. And sometimes the line of water resembled a lip, quivering with speech, and yet silent, unheard. Two swans glimmered at the edge; and beneath them, in the water, and beside them, on the polished mud, their white reflections glimmered.

Suddenly the tantara of a trumpet stung me like an enormous invisible wasp, and I looked down and saw a grey, drowned dog at my feet. His legs lay in pairs; his head curved towards hisfore-legs, his tail towards his hind-legs. He was of the colour of the mud. But his very quietness and powerlessness and abjectness, without any consideration of all the play and strife and exercise that once led him step by step towards death,—without a thought of the crimson tongue that once flickered, after hunting or fighting, like a flame of pure abandoned vitality,—gave me a strange suggestion of power and restraint, just as the misty land over the water, without any consideration of all the men and machinery that were visible there yesterday, suggested a life without those things. The beast became a puissant part of the host of all the dead or motionless or dreaming things, of statuary and trees and dead or inefficient men, and was, with them, about to convince me of a state quite other than ours, and not worse, when once again the trumpet disturbed me and turned me to the thought that I was the supreme life-giver to these things, that I gave them of myself, and that without me they were nothing; and I feared that this fancied state was but suggested by my envy of calm things, and that, though dreams may put the uttermost parts of the earth into our possession, without the dream the dreamer is nothing more than naught.

III

Thence I went to an irregular, squalid, hideous, ashen town,—a large village, but noisy and without character, neither English nor Welsh. The street songs were but a week or two behind those of London, and they were not mixed with anything but an occasional Welsh hymn tune or "Sospan bach." But there used to be an old house there that spoke of old Wales, and I went to see it.

When I came to the edge of its garden I heard a blackbird sing, and in the busy street how old and far away it sounded! as if it were true that "thrice the age of a man is that of a stag, and thrice that of a stag is that of the melodious blackbird."

Pretentious, unpicturesque, fatigued, and silent, the women walked to and fro, between the shops. Now and then an unmarried girl laughed; the others had no such energy.

It was more pleasant to be among the men, who were on the other side of the road, many of them standing still, packed close in a half-moon figure that swelled out over the pavement, and watching something. There was nothing gorgeous or adventurous or even elegant in their scrupulous dress;in the old faces either alcoholic or parched, in the waxen faces of the younger; in the voices which seemed to have been copied from the gramophone, their favourite instrument. I liked them for the complete lack of self-consciousness which allowed them to expose quite fearlessly their angular figures, their uninteresting clothes, their heartless, rigid faces that retained smiles for an incredibly short time. They were the equals, in everything but ease, of the labourers whom they were watching. But when I saw at last what they were watching, I thought that I could have rejoiced to have seen them, looking passionate for once, in flames.

For, under the direction of a foreman, whose snub nose, bow legs, and double collar made him a sublime and monstrous priest or chief of what was most horrible among the men and women of the street, a band of labourers, without pity, without even ferocity, but mechanically, was demolishing "Quebec," a dignified mid-eighteenth-century house, where for five generations a decent, stable professional family had lived, loved beauty according to its lights, and been graceful in its leisure. The very house had seemed to say, amid its troubled neighbours, as Marlowe's Edward said,

This life contemplative is heaven.

SNOWDON FROM CAPEL CURIG LAKE—SUMMER EVENING

Now it was falling in thunders and clouds of ruin; and I wondered that the people did not fall upon the enormous, red-haired, passionless men who wielded the pickaxes.

For twenty years I had known "Quebec" and had watched the streets creeping upon it, until the house and great garden were surrounded and spied upon by houses on all sides but one. That one side had been protected by a lofty and massive wall, and through that the enemy had now broken an entrance.

Behind that wall, the two Alderneys had grazed on three acres of meadow, in the midst of which had been an old orchard, and in the midst of that the gardens and the house. Once I had seen a girl with the delicate Kentish rake gathering a little hay there. In one corner, too, had been a tangle of elder and bramble, which (so we used to fancy) might possibly have—by pure and unbroken descent, miraculously escaping all change—the sap of Eden in their veins.

But the Alderneys were gone, and the meadow was slashed with ruts; the trees were down; the air was foul with dust of mortar and brick and plaster; and, mocking at the disembowelled house, new bricks, scaffolding, and iron pillars and girders layround about, among the fallen clouds of ivy, which were torn and dead. Oh, Westminster, Tintern, Godstow, Kidwelly, you have immortality, not indeed in your forms, but in the hearts of men; but "Quebec" dies with me! So I thought and wondered.

Hastily broken up, without a grave, without ceremonial, without a becoming interval of desolation in which to spend its tears, and have at least the pleasure of regret, the house, I knew, could not but send forth piteous ghosts to wander up and down,—inops, inhumataque turba,—and round their heads garlands of branches with those terrible buds that were never to be leaves,—until their sorrows and ours were smoothed by time or consumed by death. I met them afterwards in spring, when the purple of the brambles should have been at last overcome by green, and they seemed the sole inhabitants of the brand-new, crowded streets, beneath which "Quebec" is buried.

IN THE LLEDR VALLEY

Suddenly I met Philaster, who had years ago rung the great bell of the house and become the angry coachman's willing captive, so that he might see the house quite close, and the flowers and the grass. Between us we made the power of the breaker and builder as naught. For a little while, indeed, we asked, What would other children do who lived in that suburb, and had no "Quebec" to provide a home for all their fancies,—to lend its lawns for bright ladies and brave knights to walk upon,—its borders and bowers to complete the scenery of Hans Andersen,—its grey walls to hide beauty and cruelty, misers and witches, and children crying because of wicked stepmothers? We had set out, as children, to live as if for eternity. Now we would live as if for annihilation to-morrow. We would no longer set our hearts upon anything which the world can destroy. We would set our hearts upon things of the imagination—like "Quebec."

So we went up into an attic, and drew the curtains, and lit the fire, and took draughts of long oblivion, and made our sorrows pompous by reading Villon and Catullus and Du Bellay, and the close ofParadise Lost, and the thirteenth book of theMorte Darthur, and Goethe's "Now comes first love and friendship's company," and other things that reminded us of decay and beauty; and not one of them but drew a long echo from the hoary walls of "Quebec" (now safe within our brains). Yet not one of these things, however splendid or tumultuous or tender, was then too splendid or tumultuous or tender for our mood. Nor could one of them stirus so potently as the picture that came often that evening to our minds. Here was the gaudy, dismal, roaring street, its roar sometimes settling into a kind of silence through which the heart longs for voice of woman or bird to penetrate; and there, seen over the high wall, was the old man who owned "Quebec," playing bowls with several happy children in the twilight, and half-hidden by the dense border of hollyhock, red-hot poker, blush roses, nasturtium, and sunflower; and the house itself, looking more distant than it was, in that sweet light, seemed to possess those calm, impregnable high places of the wise, than which, says Lucretius, there is no possession more desirable.

Just before dawn, I came to a cleft high in the hills, so that I could only see a little copse of oak and hazel, and in the dying moonlight a thousand white islands of cloud and mountain

Totus conlucens veste atque insignibus albis.

The night had gone, and the day had not come; and the little copse had the serious, brooding airwhich all things have at that hour, and especially when the land is tender with the first hope of spring and in that reverie—

Cette rêverieQue ne pense à rien.

Cette rêverie

Que ne pense à rien.

For what I saw seemed but the fragments of something which night had built for its own delight, and as they became clearer and clearer they had more and more the appearance of being unbuilt and dissolved. But, gradually, the birds were let out and they sang. Their songs, on the wintry hill, which I had last visited in summer, broke upon the silence as in summer they never do, like the opening of the door of a room that is empty but has once been gay with fire and books and men; and sweet though the blackbird was, and shrill the missel-thrush, their songs were awful, and said that "a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us." The grass, which had truly been of no colour, though my urgent memory persuaded me that it was green, began to awake to colour, and, while in the shadow of the copse the dusk was impenetrable, the light reached a knoll where there was dead bracken still. "Colour," said Novalis, "is an effort of matter to become light," and for one moment the grassupon that knoll ceased to strive and was light. A plover that wheeled close by disappeared and was but a glow.

I went on, and on a lower slope the ploughman was beginning to plough in the shadow. Grim and worthless looked the work, until I looked round and saw the dawn that was being prepared. But I watched too carefully, for I saw it all. Ever, as it grew, statelier and richer, I said to myself, that in a little while it would be perfected: yet still I watched and I began to think of those who saw it, as I had seen it before, from windows of towns, as they rose for work, or as they douted the candles and put away cards or books, and paused for perhaps a minute, and gazed as they never gazed at human beauty, because, though they revered it, they feared it also, and though they feared it they were fascinated. I thought of those that leapt up at it; those that mourned because they had seen it pass so often before into a common day; those that, on inhospitable roads, saw it and neglected it, or cursed it after a night in which they had drunk their last poor earnings altogether. If it would but last ... I had been looking at it and had not seen it, and when I dropped these thoughts I knew that it was gone, the slowly prepared and solemn dawn which made the splendid spring of that year.

DUFFWS MOUNTAIN

Then I took a path which led out of sight of the white crested mountain and down among larches and oaks.

The wind was changing the grass from green to silver, and back again, rhythmically. In the pallid herbage at the edge of the wood it produced many little sounds, the combination of them barely louder than the sound which fancy makes among tombs; and yet that little concert passed into the ear and heart, giving a sympathy with the thousand minute sorrows of the inanimate world and a feeling that is part of the melancholy so importunately intruding on a spring day. But there, too, was trefoil, delicatest herbage of the early year, with its trick of globing and preserving rain upon its foliage, so that it is more delicate still in the grey dawn. One stalk with all its leaf singularly fine and small had grown out of a scar in a teazel stem.

So I came into a valley, and there was one white house in it, with a green, glowing, and humming garden, and at the door a woman who might have been the Old Year. It was one ofthose white houses so fair that in the old time a poet compared a girl's complexion with them, as with lilies and foam. It held all the sun, so that suddenly I knew that in another valley, farther south and farther east, the rooks were making the lanes sleepy with their busy talk; the kingfishers were in pairs on the brooks, whose gentle water was waving and combing the hair of the river moss; the gold of the willow catkin was darkened by bees; over an old root of dock was a heaving colony of gleaming ants; perhaps the chiffchaff had come to the larches and the little green moschatel was in flower with large primroses among the ash stoles in wet woods; and in the splendid moments of the day the poplars seemed to come into the world, suddenly, all purple....

Yet here there was no rich high-hedged lane, no poplar, no noise of rooks, but only a desolate brown moorland crossed by deep swift brooks through which the one footpath ran, and this white house, like a flower on a grave, recalling these memories of other valleys; so that I forgot that near by the birches stood each in a basin of foam from the dripping of mist and rain, and that I had not yet seen a thrush's nest in any hawthorn on those hills. Therefore, I counted that house as lucky for me as the Welshman's hazel-stick in the tale that is told in Iolo Morganwg's life.

DUFFWS MOUNTAIN IN MIST

This is the tale.

A Welshman, with a fine hazel-stick in his hand, was once stopped on London Bridge by an Englishman, who asked whence he came. "From my own country," said the Welshman churlishly. "Do not take it amiss," said the Englishman; "and if you will tell me what I ask, and take my advice, it will be much for your good. Under the roots of the tree from which came your stick, there are great treasures of gold and silver; if you can remember the place, and will take me to it, I will make the treasure yours."

Now knowing that the fellow was a magician, the Welshman, though at first unwilling to be a party in this strange thing, at length agreed, and went with him to Craig-y-Dinas and showed him the hazel-tree. They dug out the root and found a broad flat stone underneath, which covered the entrance to a cave. They went in, the magician warning the Welshman lest he should touch a bell that hung in the middle of their path. At the spacious further end of the cave, they saw many warriors lying asleep in a circle, with bright armour on, and weapons ready at hand. One of thewarriors, refulgent above all the rest, had a jewelled and golden crown along with the shield and battle-axe at his side.

At the feet of the warriors, in the middle of the circle, they saw two immense heaps, the one of gold, the other of silver, and the magician told the Welshman that he might take away as much as he could carry from either of the heaps. So he took much gold. The magician took nothing. On their way out of the cave he again warned the Welshman lest he should touch the bell. But should he touch it, said the magician, some of the warriors would surely awake and ask "if it was yet day": to which he must at once answer: "No, sleep thou on," whereupon the warriors would sleep again. And this the Welshman found to be truth when he staggered under his gold and grazed the bell; but remembering the other's words, he said: "Sleep thou on" when the warriors asked if it were day; and they slept.

When they had left the cave, and closed the entrance, the magician told the Welshman that he might return to the cave whenever he wished; that the warriors were the knights of King Arthur, and the warrior with the jewelled and golden crown was King Arthur; that they were awaitingthe day when the Black Eagle and the Golden Eagle should go to war; for on that day the trembling earth would toll the bell, and at that sound the king and the knights of the king would awake, take their weapons, overthrow the Saxon, recover the island of Britain, and again establish their king at Caerlleon, in justice and in peace and for ever. But the Welshman spent his gold. He went again to the cave; he overloaded his back with gold; he stumbled and the bell rang; he forgot the password. And the knights rose and leaned upon their elbows, and one of them stood up and took away his gold and beat him and thrust him out and closed the mouth of the cave; and though he and many others made all the hill sore with their digging, the cave was not found again.

For half a day there was now a world of snow, a myriad flakes falling, a myriad rising, and nothing more save the sound of rivers; and now a world of green undulating hills that smiled in the lap of the grey mountains, over which moved large clouds, sometimes tumultuous and grey, sometimes whiteand slow, but always fringed with fire. When the snow came, the mountains dissolved and were not. When the mountains were born again out of the snow, the snow seemed but to have polished the grass, and put a sharper sweetness in the song of the thrush and the call of the curlew, and left the thinnest of cirrus clouds upon the bare field, where it clung only to the weeds. So, in this dialogue of mountain and snow, nothing was easily remembered or even credible, until I came to the foot of a hill which hazels and oak trees crowned. The snow was disappearing and the light came precipitately through it and struck the hill. All the olive and silver and leaden stems of oak and hazel glowed together and made a warm haze and changed the hill into an early sunset cloud out of which came the cooing of wood-pigeons. The mountains lay round, grey, faint, unimportant, about to pass away; the country that lay between them and the hill was still in mist. So the hill rose up crowned and garlanded like a statue in a great hall of some fair woman of whom one wonders what art can persuade her to stay on that cold pedestal for ever. The wood-pigeons cooed continually; and there was the hill, using all the sunlight, as a chrysanthemum will do in a London street. It lived; it appealed to all the sense and brain together; it was splendid; it was Spring's, and I do not know of anything else that mattered or was, for the time. Very sweet it was to see the world as but a shining green hill and a shining brown wood, with a wood-pigeon for a voice, while all other things that had been were gone like the snow. That there was also a wind I knew only because it brought with it the scent of a farmyard behind: for it had motion but no sound. Something in me was content to see the hill as a monument of Spring that might endure for ever, that the wood-pigeons might coo their song; and saw that it made possible the sound of bells in an evening landscape, of wheat in sheaves, and quiet beeches and doves among them. Yet I climbed to the wood, and saw that last year's leaves were too thick yet for a flower to pierce them; and that same wind had found a brittle, dead ash-tree in which to sing a cold November song; and the pigeons clapped their wings and flew away. And that cold November song made me remember against myself the old legend of the child who played with fairies, but came once with her mother and saw them no more.

COMING NIGHT, NEAR BEDDGELERT

There were, says the story, at a small harbour belonging to Nefyn, some houses in which severalfamilies formerly lived; the houses are there still, but nobody lives in them now. There was one family there to which a little girl belonged; they used to lose her for hours every day; so her mother was very angry with her for being so much away. "I must know," said she, "where you go for your play." The girl answered that it was to Pin-y-Wig, "The Wig point," which means a place to the west of the Nefyn headland; it was there, she said, she played with many children. "They are very nice children,—much nicer," said the child, "than I am." "I must know whose children they are," was the reply; and one day the mother went with her little girl to see the children. It was a distance of about a quarter of a mile to Pin-y-Wig, and after climbing the slope and walking a little along the top they came in sight of the Pin. It is from this Pin that the people of Pen-yr-Allt got water, and it is from there they get it still. Now after coming near the Pin the little girl raised her hands with joy at the sight of the children. "Oh, mother," said she, "their father is with them to-day; he is not with them always; it is only sometimes that he is." The mother asked the child where she saw them. "There they are, mother, running down to the Pin, with their father sitting down." "I see nobody, my child," was the reply, and great fear came upon the mother; she took hold of the child's hand in terror, and it came to her mind at once that they were theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin-y-Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged people's children with their own.

ABERGLASLYN

Yesterday, the flower of the wood-sorrel and the song of the willow-wren came together into the oak woods, and higher up on the mountain, though they were still grey, the larches were misty and it was clearly known that soon they would be green. The air was full of the bleating of lambs, and though there was a corpse here and there, so fresh and blameless was it that it hardly spoiled the day. The night was one of calm and breathing darkness; nor was there any moon; and therefore the sorrowful darkness and angularity of early spring valleys by moonlight, when they have no masses of foliage to make use of the beams, did not exist. It was dark and warm, and from the invisible orchard, where snow yet lay under the stone wall, came a fragrance which, though it was not May, brought into our minds the song thatwas made for May in another orchard high among hills:

Have you ne'er waked in the grey of the day-dawnWhitely to stand at the window scarce seen,Over the garden to peer in the May-dawnPast to the fruit-close whose pale boughs not greenSlowly reveal a fresh faintness a-flutterWhite to the young grass and pink to the sky?O, then a low call to waking we utter:"Bluth, lasses, apple-bluth spirts low and high."Out, lasses, out, to the apple-garth hasten—Nay, never tarry to net your glad hair—Here are no lovers your kissed shoes to fasten(O, for the days when girls' feet may go bare).O'er the dim lawn the may-rime yet lingers,Pallid and dark as the down of the dawn—Gather your skirts in your delicate fingers,Stoop as you run o'er the almond-hung lawn.Look through the trees ere dawn's twilight is over—Lo, how the light boughs seem lost in the stars;Everywhere bluth the grey sky seems to coverQuivering and scented, new spring's kisses' scars.Wet are the blossoms to wash your faint faces—Bury your faces cheek-deep in their chill;Press the flushed petals and open your dresses—So—let them trickle your young breasts to thrill.Winter has wronged us of sunlight and sweetness,We who so soon must be hid from the sun;Winter is on us as summer's completenessFaint-hearted drops down a tired world undone;Brief is the bloom-time as sleepy maids' laughterWho know not one bed-time 'tis summer's last day.Though from the heart of the rose they have quaffed her.Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey.

Have you ne'er waked in the grey of the day-dawn

Whitely to stand at the window scarce seen,

Over the garden to peer in the May-dawn

Past to the fruit-close whose pale boughs not green

Slowly reveal a fresh faintness a-flutter

White to the young grass and pink to the sky?

O, then a low call to waking we utter:

"Bluth, lasses, apple-bluth spirts low and high."

Out, lasses, out, to the apple-garth hasten—Nay, never tarry to net your glad hair—Here are no lovers your kissed shoes to fasten(O, for the days when girls' feet may go bare).O'er the dim lawn the may-rime yet lingers,Pallid and dark as the down of the dawn—Gather your skirts in your delicate fingers,Stoop as you run o'er the almond-hung lawn.

Out, lasses, out, to the apple-garth hasten—

Nay, never tarry to net your glad hair—

Here are no lovers your kissed shoes to fasten

(O, for the days when girls' feet may go bare).

O'er the dim lawn the may-rime yet lingers,

Pallid and dark as the down of the dawn—

Gather your skirts in your delicate fingers,

Stoop as you run o'er the almond-hung lawn.

Look through the trees ere dawn's twilight is over—Lo, how the light boughs seem lost in the stars;Everywhere bluth the grey sky seems to coverQuivering and scented, new spring's kisses' scars.Wet are the blossoms to wash your faint faces—Bury your faces cheek-deep in their chill;Press the flushed petals and open your dresses—So—let them trickle your young breasts to thrill.

Look through the trees ere dawn's twilight is over—

Lo, how the light boughs seem lost in the stars;

Everywhere bluth the grey sky seems to cover

Quivering and scented, new spring's kisses' scars.

Wet are the blossoms to wash your faint faces—

Bury your faces cheek-deep in their chill;

Press the flushed petals and open your dresses—

So—let them trickle your young breasts to thrill.

Winter has wronged us of sunlight and sweetness,We who so soon must be hid from the sun;Winter is on us as summer's completenessFaint-hearted drops down a tired world undone;Brief is the bloom-time as sleepy maids' laughterWho know not one bed-time 'tis summer's last day.Though from the heart of the rose they have quaffed her.Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey.

Winter has wronged us of sunlight and sweetness,

We who so soon must be hid from the sun;

Winter is on us as summer's completeness

Faint-hearted drops down a tired world undone;

Brief is the bloom-time as sleepy maids' laughter

Who know not one bed-time 'tis summer's last day.

Though from the heart of the rose they have quaffed her.

Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey.

We had talked long into the night, and then as sleep came, out of this darkness peered the early timorous warble of a blackbird, and gradually all the birds in orchard, hedge, and wood made a thick mist or curtain of innumerable and indistinguishable notes through which still crept the bolder note of that same nearest blackbird. As the night lost its heaviness, though not its stillness, the continuous mist of songs grew thicker and seemed to produce or to be one with the faint darkness which so soon was to be light. It seemed also to be making the landscape which I saw being made, when I looked out. There, was the side of the hill; there the larches, the dark hedges, and the lingering snow and the orchard: they were what I had seen before, but changed and increased; and very subtle, plaintive, menacing, vast, was the work, though when the light had fully come, once more the larches, the hedges, and the orchard were as if they had never been sung to a new order of beauty by the mist of songs, and yet not the same, any more than a full coffin is the same as the lips and eyes and hands and hair, of which it contains all that we did not love. And still there were many songs; but you could tell who sung each of them, if you wished.

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