CHAPTER VIII.

The ascent of Snowdon.

that infinitesimal dot be the hotel that had held forty people the night before?

It was Miss O’Flannigan who made the contemptible suggestion that we should return to Rhyddu and get particulars of the sunrise and the view from the landlady’s daughter. I repelled the suggestion with appropriate spirit; but half an hour later, when, with acute neuralgia in the muscles above my knees, I was reduced to lifting each leg in succession with my hands, I hardly dared to think of the horse-hair sofa in the parlour of the Quellyn Arms. As we dragged ourselves up at the pace relentlessly demanded by Griffith Roberts, all sense of connection with the world below went from us. It was weeks since we had supped at Rhyddu, years since the tourist shouted his final warnings after us at Mahntooroch. We were in another planet, toiling up through some dim, endless purgatory to ever higher levels in the manner so trimly arranged by the newer Spiritualism—only that instead of the corresponding moral elevation, the one emotion in which wewere conscious of any progress was detestation of Griffith Roberts. A sodden twilight, not born of sunset or moonrise, came down about us, and the tormented vapours writhed up to meet it from the voids on either hand as we went delicately along the ridge that leads, like a horse’s crest, from shoulder to summit of the mountain. The ridge grew more and more slender, and we picked our aching steps more and more carefully. One of the Tommies’ saddles would have been almost wide enough to have spanned it comfortably at one place—the happy Tommies, now doubtless sleeping like infants in their little beds at Rhyddu; and Miss O’Flannigan has since admitted her almost uncontrollable desire to traverse it after the manner of a serpent.

It was half-past nine o’clock when Griffith Roberts led his now speechless prey up to the tiny plateau whereon were a large cairn of stones, two men, and two squalid wooden shanties.

“Ze taap,” observed Griffith Roberts, coldly.

A solitarycandle struggled with the obscurity as we stumbled through a narrow door into the shanty indicated to us. It illuminated principally the features of a young gentleman in a check ulster and a Tam o’ Shanter cap, who sat behind it with a note-book and pencil and an indefinite air of being connected with the Press, and his eye-glasses flashed upon us with almost awful inquiry as the light caught them beneath the dashing tilt of his cap. The next most immediate impression was of the cabin of a fifth-rate coasting steamer: dingy wooden walls, a bare seat running round them, two tables, three cramped doorways, and a pigmy stove. That was the sum-total of the surroundings; but thefact that there was a fire in the stove crowded out all deficiencies for the first ten minutes.

The cold was clinging, inescapable, unbelieveable, at least for people who had come sweltering up in light attire from a world where it was midsummer and behaved as such. The opening of the stove was about as large as the lens of a Kodak, and might have heated us through if moved up and down our persons, as a painter burns old paint off with a brazier. Failing this, we had to reverse the process, and rotate endlessly before that single, sullen glow, while from the corner the twin malignity of the double eye-glasses blazed upon us.

“I thought I was goin’ to be all alone up here to-night,” said a voice from behind the eye-glasses—a voice of that class which, like Scott’s poetry, “scorns to be obscure,” and proclaims its natal Brixton in clarion tones. “I’ve bin kicking my ’eels up ’ere since five o’clock, and I cawn’t say it’s bin lively!” The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn, followed by a giggle of

“The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn.”

incipient boon-companionship, but the conversation was not given time to expand with the luxuriance of which it was doubtless capable. The door of the cabin was opened, and Griffith Roberts stood without, waiting for his lawful five shillings, and, subsequently, the price of a drink (which, in deference to our possible scruples, was entitled “ginger-beer”). We bade him good-bye without a pang. He is a good man, and would be invaluable as hare for a paper-chase; but if we ever ascend Snowdon again—which Heaven forfend—it will not be under his guidance.

We stood at the door and watched him go down and down through the lifeless twilight, till the cold bit through and through our summer coats and linen shirts, and a precept of early youth rose menacingly in our minds:—

“Whatever brawls disturb the street,Wear flannel next your skin.”

What if we both developed influenza on the top of Snowdon! Some preservative was instantlynecessary: we hurriedly appealed to the proprietor of the cabin for hot water, and were supplied with a boiling jugful on the spot. The Summit Hotel does not go in for style, but it understands the mystery of boiling water, which is a thing too deep for many of its betters.

I have often had cause to curse the day on which it was revealed to Miss O’Flannigan, by a palmist, that she was subject to medical inspirations; but even the power of speech was denied to me for some minutes after I had tasted the mixture of Bovril, whisky, and hot water, compounded by my companion under the influence of her latest inspiration. Our fellow-tourist, after a period of aghast observation, attacked his note-book with an ardour that convinces us that the recipe will be made glorious by his pen in the columns of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer.’ Then he drew forth a pipe and tobacco-pouch, and looked first at the mists which were pressing against the little port-hole of a window behind his head,and then at us. We accepted the hint, and retired to the cabin allotted to us.

It was about seven feet square, and contained a bedstead that covered all the room save a strip of two feet, on which stood a doll’s chest of drawers with a small jug and basin on it. In the face of the fact that there was but one other bedroom, it was idle to speculate as to how the forty visitors of the night before had disposed themselves; but a very cursory investigation of the sheets forced us to the conclusion that many of them had gone to bed in their boots. Possibly they were right. Top-boots and an entire suit of oil-skins would alone have brought those sheets within the sphere of practical politics. We wrapped ourselves in the blankets, and lay down, fully clad, to wait for the dawn.

Never before that night had I known how much more miserable one may be made by sleep than by the want of it. The thin doses forced on us by fatigue had the property of magnifying-glasses, and turned a vague insufficiency of pillow into abroken neck, the cold and stiffness into centuries of Arctic hardship. A monotonous wind sighed round the shanty, and the small uncurtained window held a changeless square of ghostly light, that, in the intervals of the fevered dreams of this midsummer’s night, became a giant luminous matchbox hanging on the wall beside us. Once or twice Miss O’Flannigan broached in gloomy monologue reflections proper to the occasion, theirleit motifbeing that we, the newspaper-man, and the two shanty proprietors, were the five highest people in England. I cannot remember that I contributed to the conversation anything more appropriate than the remark of a slighted Dublin aristocrat, in vindication of her rights of precedence, “and me the rankest lady in the room,”—which, indeed, had only a remote and dreamlike connection with the subject.

The luminous paint in the window-frame was just perceptibly brighter when the door of the opposite shanty opened, and we heard a heavy step outside. By this time we had become reconciled to the blankets, and we held our breaths with the dread that there might be a sunrise, and that we should have to go out into the piercing air to look at it. There was a battering upon the Brixtonian door, and then a voice: “It’s a quarter past three, sir, and it’s averythick morning,” and then our heroic fellow-traveller: “Never mind, I’m comin’ out.”

We lay, silent as stones, listening intently. The footstep paused at our door, but relenting, passed on without knocking. Presently we heard the newspaper-man go forth like the dove from the ark, and, after a similarly brief absence, return, and settle himself down in the saloon, where, faithful to the interests of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer,’ he no doubt occupied himself in recording his impressions of the mist. For the sake of our self-respect we rose and looked out of the window—a shuddering glance which scarcely revealed to us the foggy outlines of the other shanty and the cairn of stones.

Beyond these, a thick curtain of mist without afold in it. In the bitter cold and the hideous daylight we shawled ourselves again in our blankets and slept miserably till seven o’clock, when, after such gruesome toilet as circumstances and a small jug of ice-cold water permitted, we emerged from our cabin, objects that our nearest relations would have been justified in cutting. The gentleman from Brixton had gone, and the sun had arrived too late to arrange a sunrise, but still anxious to oblige. There was also a kettle of boiling water, a loaf of bread, and a clear fire in the stove. All these things disposed us to realise with a new benevolence what an achievement of labour and perseverance was embodied in the Summit Hotel. The ponies on whose backs each plank and each lump of coal has been carried up are alone able to estimate that achievement perfectly, but they are not likely to expatiate on it, and the fleshless mountain-track repudiates the hoof-prints that could tell of scramble and struggle.

Outside the shanty, when we stepped into the open air, we found most of Wales, clad in thechilly, opaline tints of morning, waiting in complacent silence for the inevitable burst of admiration. On three sides of it was a hazy shimmer, a misty sparkle, betraying the environing sea, from the river Dee to the Bay of Cardigan, and close about us were the grey spines and huge slants of the Snowdon range. George Herbert, with a fine discrimination, has said—

“Praise the sea, but stay on shore.”

And in respectful adaption of this counsel, we would say to those who ascend heights for the sake of the view, that a mountain, in shape, in colour, in sentiment, in every possible aspect, is more praiseworthy from its base than from its summit. Moreover, as to the view itself, it seems to us that a beautiful view is not a mere matter of miles seen from a great height. The world was obviously made to be regardeden profile, and not to be stared at, flat-faced, from above; and the view from the top of Snowdon impresses the imagination rather than the sense of beauty. Tolook across the tiny hedgerow and homestead anatomy of the nearer counties, away to England in the distant haze, was to taste suddenly the core of many trite sayings about human effort and insignificance, and in spite of triteness the great expanse, sown with silent life, was wonderful beyond the symmetry of mountain-peaks.

Many things were revealed to us on the way down that had been withheld by the mist and twilight of the ascent. Ravines into whose purple shadows the sun had not yet looked—green valleys, with little lakes lurking in them—white paths straggling away to every point of the compass—and pre-eminent and ubiquitous, the soda-water bottle, the sandwich-paper, and the orange-peel. It was still October when we started, but now as we scrambled, slid, and ran with brief, unintentional abandonment down the path, we were travelling back along the gamut of the months. By the time we had arrived at the first halting-place of the night before, our own temperatures had touched a point that made us independentof climate; but though we were hardly in a condition to appreciate the balm of mid-June that was coming up from the pastures, we could not wish it to be chilled.

Striding up the lower fields, with an ardour that we recognised compassionately as having once been ours, were two tourists, a middle-aged gentleman and his daughter. They paused as they met us, to unburden themselves of a kindly platitude or two about the weather; and it is still on Miss O’Flannigan’s conscience that she gave these harmless wayfarers careful particulars as to Griffith Roberts’s short cut, and received their gratitude without compunction.

Shortly after this incident it was that we met the postmaster of Rhyddu communing alone with nature—a very noble-looking person, in a costume modelled upon that of the most sumptuous tourist. Considering how far we were from the ideal female of the species, he treated us with unexpected affability, even giving himself the trouble of accompanying us back to the village, favouring usmeanwhile with his political opinions, his low opinion of the Irish race—legitimately founded on a large experience of intoxicated hay-makers—and other details. He afterwards sold us letter-cards at a fancy price suggested by ourselves: the problem of the price of seven, if nine cost tenpence halfpenny, or some similar sum, being beyond the grasp of the human intellect.

“A costume modelled on that of the most sumptuous tourist.”

It was 10.30 when we reached the Quellyn Arms, and while the sympathetic Miss Jones prepared cans of hot water and breakfast, we visited the orphaned Tommies. The Quellyn Arms does not profess to stable horses, therefore it cannot be regarded as an unkindness if we mention that the Tommies were housed in what seemed to be a lumber-room. Broken things that might have been beds, washing-mangles, or turnip-cutters, choked the entrance. One saddle was perched on a bedpost, like a bonnet on a stand in a shop-window, the other lay on the ground, and behind the heap glowered the indignant faces of the Tommies. Both had pulled their heads out of their halters, and, in default of other food, were tearing the stuffing out of an ancient palliasse. In the boxes that served as mangers were a few nettles and stalks of mint, sole remnants of some strange repast which must have borne about the same relation to hay that curry does to boiled mutton. The hotel cook strolled into the stable while we were there; it seemed she had been hay-making during a pause in the duties of the cuisine—a fact that recurred to us when subsequently the flavour of the hay-fields was perceptible in that of the tea.

The cook at Rhyddu.

She kindly permitted us to fill the mangers of the Tommies from her private hoard of poultrycorn, and it was on this occasion that we realised their relation to us was that of rather alarmed nephews towards severe but conscientious aunts. There was good feeling on both sides, there was even a little affection, but the auntly element was ineradicable.

Thepeople of Rhyddu were unanimous on one point. They united with enthusiasm to assure us that there was a short cut to Llanberis, that the same was easy, and also that it was advantageous. At this stage of our investigations, however, a piano-organ with a monkey absorbed the attention which, till then, had been lavished upon us and the Tommies—and we left Rhyddu with nothing better to guide us than an impression of hands waving vaguely towards a spur of Snowdon, and some sense of the vital importance of a certain lane by a farmhouse.

In the course of two miles we attempted three lanes, and found they all ended alike at a barking dog and a closed door; finally, we addressed ourselves to a pair of shears, which, moved by unseen hands at the inner side of a hedge, was clapping its jaws malevolently among the topmost privet sprouts. There was a small hotel at the other side of the road, and neither lane nor farmhouse was in sight; but a voice from behind the hedge informed us in unusually fluent English that the short cut to Llanberis started precisely from the yard of the hotel. The yard was deserted, but some semblance of a track wandered from it, and we surrendered ourselves to it. It met with an early death at the gateway of a large, steep field, unpleasantly filled with cattle and young horses, and we were on the point of turning back to insult the man with the shears, when a cow in our vicinity lay down to ruminate, and disclosed a fat, yellow-haired boy who had been standing behind her. To him the stimulating copper was at once administered, and under his guidance we pursued an imperceptible path through the cattle up to the hill, with a confidence not shared by the Tommies, who were, indeed, but moderate mountaineers.

At the next field the boy paused, seeming to consider that we had had our pennyworth; further moneys at intervals impelled him upwards to the highest limits of the pasture-land; but there, unmoved even by the sight of sixpence, he left us, with the information that when we had gone as high as we could, we should—if we did not lose our way—find a gate, and from that gate a good road would take us to Llanberis. The instructions had a pleasing simplicity, and, if applied to a tree or a pyramid, would have been easily followed. The Snowdon range, however, offers a large selection of highest points, and of these we naturally chose the lowest and nearest. The Tommies crept like beetles athwart the slant of the hill, and we, our feelings of humanity somewhat blunted by the exertions of the morning, sat upon their backs, and saw momently a little more of their persons in front of us, as the saddles receded towards their tails.

The hill was above us in heather on our left, below us in steep pasture on the right, and the Tommies were digging their hoofs into a slantingledge between the two. We ascended slowly, clinging to the ponies’ manes, I in advance of Miss O’Flannigan, who was in one of her most conversational moods, and demanded my frequent appreciation of the landscape with an enthusiasm that seemed to me ill-timed. Each time I so much as turned my head, the saddle and the hold-all turned sympathetically with me, and I was in the act of ignoring an appeal to my æsthetic feelings when Miss O’Flannigan’s voice ceased abruptly. This was so unusual an occurrence that I took a fresh handful of the mane and looked round. Miss O’Flannigan was standing on her head on the off-side of her pony, on whose back nothing was now visible except the girths, while beneath his body hung the hold-all. What it was that formed the link between him and Miss O’Flannigan was not apparent, but as he was eating grass with unshaken calm it was not a matter of vital importance.

Before I had dismounted and reached the scene of the disaster Miss O’Flannigan was free: she had, in fact, rolled over the edge of the ledge intoa clump of heather, and was emerging from it, hatless, and in a state of the highest indignation. There is an unconscious, undesired picturesqueness about a person whose hair has come down, and I did not altogether refrain from mentioning this to Miss O’Flannigan, but she had lost her interest in the picturesque. The Tommies, fortunately, viewed the affair from one aspect only—that of a heaven-bestowed interval for food; and during the arduous processes of re-saddling and of binding the hold-alls, like burnt-offerings, to the horns of the saddles (for we had determined upon walking till we reached the top of the hill), they did not give us a moment’s anxiety.

No eyes but those of the aghast, black-faced sheep and the coldly interested carrion-crows witnessed the occurrence, or the subsequent procession upwards, over slippery grass and through the boundless quagmires caused by a stream that seemed newly spilled on the face of the hill, and was still wandering in search of a bed. The hut on the top of Snowdon was visible—an angularatom, retaining even, as a silhouette of the eighth of an inch square, its air ofgaminself-sufficiency and adequacy for its position of overseer to England and Wales. With the aid of field-glasses, it and its inmates might have come to the conclusion that two aproned and gaitered Deans of the Church of England were leading a pair of heavy-laden sumpter-palfreys over the pass to Llanberis, or might eventually have made the discovery that the most simple manner of adapting a riding-habit to mountain walks is not necessarily the most graceful.

From our private point of view it seemed many times that we had gone as high as was possible before we found the gate that was to compose all difficulties. It linked two long strips of grey wall that had striven towards each other from afar, down mountain flanks and up from boggy valleys, like two lives fated to meet and overcoming circumstance. Their juncture was, as the boy had truly said, on the highest point of the hill; and leaning breathless on the gate, while the

The ascent of the Deans.

Tommies tore at the wiry little rushes which grew all about, we looked down a deep, empty valley to open country with the glint of water and the smoke of villages. A track of two feet wide sprang from the farther side of the gate and drew

“Two or three startled, audacious pony faces peering round a pile of boulders.”

a steady line along the naked, green face of the valley, outlining the buxom curves like a string course with an encouraging downward tendency in it. Gingerly we trod it, each with an excessively awkward and all-dubious Tommy in tow—while the slope below, on the right hand, became a great deal steeper than was pleasant to look at, and that above, on the left, so pronounced as to preclude the possibility of walking on it. Emerging from a shallow scoop in the face of the hill, and paying more heed to my steps than to my surroundings, I felt the steady drag of the elder Thomas upon the reins become a violent full-stop, and was suddenly aware of two or three startled, audacious pony faces peering round a pile of boulders at the turn of the path. They were gone with a whisk of forelocks and a rattle of loosened stones; and having in some measure reassured the deeply scandalised Tommies, we proceeded, not without some inward speculation as to what would happen to them, and to us, if these sylvan cousins of theirs were to come avalanching round the corner upon us in an unfortunate burst of family feeling. A few steps took us round the sharp bend of the hill, and we came face to face with the foe—a dozen tiny ponies, standing in dramatic attitudes of expectancy, with heads high in the air, and wide nostrils spread to the scent of danger. For an instant their wild eyes devoured us and their brethren of the captivity, and then Miss O’Flannigan obeyed her Keltic instincts, and stooped to pick up a stone. At that world-comprehended and world-respected signal they turned all at once, as if blown by a wind, and floated down the green valley-side, whose steepness we had scarcely cared to look at, with heads up, manes and tails streaming, and shoeless hoofs flicking the turf in bounds that seemed headlong, yet never went beyond control. In the bottom of the valley they swung to the right with the incredible oneness of a flock of birds, and halting, looked up to us and neighed defiance. The Tommies hurried on without comment.

Shortly afterwards the rain began,—diffidently, as if it had forgotten how, but the low bosom ofthe grey sky was laid against the hills, and the undisciplined drops did not long want for reinforcement. The salmon-coloured Dolgelly parasol made but a dismaldébutunder these auspices, and glowed with a more and more sullen flush as the rain soaked through it and dropped in dirty pink tears from its spikes. Between the tears I saw little except the endless downward progress of the path and unprepossessing glimpses of landscape blind with rain. We mounted the Tommies and scrambled by many stony descents and wet fields to lower levels; a thin cascade glanced over the black lip of a ravine and dropped delicately with slanting leaps down a hundred feet or more; wet roofs appeared below us, then a public road, public-houses, public conveyances, and an intelligent public interest in us and the Dolgelly parasol. The conclusion that we were a circus, or some part of one, was immediately and loudly announced by the infant population; and a vivid representation on a poster of a young lady hovering in pink tights above the foaming manesof six white horses, explained that the infant mind had lately been educated in such matters.

That we should have fortuitously selected the Snowdon Valley Hotel from among the many others of the long street was, in this connection, a singular instance of hypnotic suggestion. As we turned towards the coffee-room, the landlady, after a moment obviously spent in comparing us with the poster, made up her mind to give us the benefit of the doubt.

“Perhaps you would rather step to the drawing-room,” she said, hesitatingly; and while she spoke the chorus of “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” broke forth from the hilarious conversation in the coffee-room, “we have the—a—the circus ladies and gentlemen in there.”

A dullroar vibrated through my dreams at some unknown hour of the next morning, and with such faculties as were not absorbed by the feat of sliding head-first down Snowdon on a telegraph wire, I set it down as being a manifestation of the circus ladies and gentlemen. Later on I realised that the circus ladies and gentlemen did not manifest themselves to any appreciable extent before luncheon-time; and while we sat at a lonely breakfast in the coffee-room, and inhaled through an open window the rainy wind that was preferable to the prisoned aroma suggestive of “a wet night,” the vibrating roar fell at intervals into our moody silence. Between the gables of temperance hotels, and through the cold drifts of rain, the sheer faceof a mountain gleamed black as ink, checkered with angular scars, carved and sliced into precipitous terraces, ridden of blaspheming steam-engines that vaunted over its defeat with their white plumes of vapour. Occasionally a darkly glittering avalanche of slate-rubbish shot downwards into the lake below, the mountain groaned as its dead went hurtling to their burial, and the sullen protest shook the air. Llanberis seems indifferent to the fact that the principal feature in its scenery is being transferred in slices to the roofs of other people’s houses, and in helter-skelter tons to the bottom of its lake: perhaps it is helpless, and if so we offer it sympathy.

As has been insinuated, it was a wet day, and for some time I feared that my influence over Miss O’Flannigan was not sufficient to dissuade her from purchasing a species of pall, made of black painted canvas, and worn as a cape by “the common quarrymen,” as she was coldly told by the lady behind the counter. The further information, however, that its price was seven and elevenpence,caused her to lay it longingly down and ask for an umbrella—“A very bad umbrella,” she explained; “the worst kind you have got——”

Economy is a virtue that the Welsh do not encourage in the alien. The shopwoman did not for some time permit herself to believe that what Miss O’Flannigan desired was primarily cheapness, and secondarily extent, and not silver chains, and ouches, and greyhounds’ heads carved in the purest bone. Like many another of her race and calling, she was fated to find us commercial disappointments of the most ignoble kind, and forth, with whatever reluctance, came eventually the lustrous alpaca, the gingham that even in youth looks grey and stout, the massive black handle, the gluey fragrance. A subordinate in goloshes, worn over white stockings, brought them in relays from some remote parts of the house,—some apparently from a period of hibernating in a feather-bed, judging by the fragments of down that adhered both to them and to their bearer. With the largest of the ginghams, at one-and-nine,with two red comforters, such as are worn by virtuous woodmen in coloured almanacs, and with a bag of biscuits (bought at the opposite counter), we retired into the rain through a doorway garnished with alarming sacrifices in flannelettes and elastic-sided boots, and hardened our hearts for the road.

“We retired into the rain.”

Bettwys-y-Coed was twelve miles away, or even more, as the landlady warned us with what we hope was disinterested zeal for our welfare; but even twelve miles in the rain seemed preferable to the ladies’ drawing-room with the photograph-books and the view into the first floor above the oppositeshop, where the hat-trimming department, unoccupied as ourselves, sat conversationally in the windows, “nor deemed the pastime slow.”

Draped in horse-sheets to keep the saddles dry, the Tommies presently stood at the door; and swaddled, like cabmen, in comforters and capes, we came forth and mounted. During the process of sorting the reins, the umbrellas, and the tips for the two ostlers, we could not but be aware of the guileless enjoyment of the hat department opposite, and the more critical but equally unaffected interest of the circus ladies and gentlemen at the window of a ground-floor sitting-room. As we unfurled the pink parasol and the tent-like gingham and went down the street like a pair of fungi on four legs, the chorus that broke from the ground-floor window was acutely audible:—

“Oo’re ye goin’ to meet, Bill?’Aveye bought the street, Bill?Lorf?—why, I thought I should’adied——”

Our riding-canes were in the hold-alls, but we kicked the Tommies to a trot and fled. Thetemperance hotels and the villas faded into the mist behind, and we were alone.

In the partial shelter of a soaked sycamore the usual, the inevitable, process of altering the girths was carried out, while the drips flopped suddenly on our noses or the backs of our necks, with an untiring sense of humour, and the tips to the ostlers were repented of with more than usual fervour.

To visit the Pass of Llanberis in such weather was an act as unworthy as calling on a stranger during a spring cleaning. Its mountains were dressing-gowned in ragged cloud, its lake turned to a slab of slate, its vista bleared by the cold, thick rain; but it had still a murky nobility, and streams, long silent, cast themselves from its parapets, and gauged with white streaks the depth of precipice and jutting crag. Upwards in streaming gradients rose the road, along the slanting floor of the valley—if indeed the name of valley is not too tender for that rent in the dark heart of the mountain, with its sides strewn with wreckageof boulders, and its black walls towering implacably, untouched by summer. Upwards also, in exaggerated dolour, crept the Tommies, as well aware as we that the hold-alls, in which were our riding-canes, were following by coach. The stick of the gingham was indeed a formidable club, but being swathed in voluminous folds of material, a blow from it amounted to no more than a cumbrous caress, and the application of handle, spikes, or ferrule proved equally ineffective.

Bare green hills followed on Llanberis Pass. We were high among them in a strong wind that sang in our teeth, and brought the hard rain slanting against us. We looked neither before nor after, and barely spared a sidelong eye for such things as appeared on either hand. They were not many. The lonely inn of Pen-y-Gwrd, where a glimpse was caught of tourists thronging in a window to snatch this sovereign incident of a day that might otherwise have ended in a strait-waist-coat; a herd of pony-mothers with their foals; a plover wheeling and whistling in the belief thatshe was leading astray our search for her nest; then Capel Curig, a scattered village, lying pleasantly and beautifully on the shoulder of a lake-filled valley. Through the windows of a big hotel we saw luncheon lie even more beautifully, but it could not be thought of. Six miles of mountain rain had not been thrown away upon us; our clothes had admitted it at all possible crevices; the red comforters were inscribing equally red stripes upon our necks with their wet, harsh folds; the gingham looked like a widowed vulture, weeping tears of gluey ink upon all things in its vast circumference. Better to accumulate all possible wetness, and spread ourselves irrevocably to dry at Bettwys-y-Coed.

The road was suddenly lovely at Capel Curig, and thereafter to Bettwys. Trees shaded it, deep glens beside it hid their rivers and waterfalls under the locked branches of beech and oak, and the rain dropped more kindly in the still shelter. We were on the great Holyhead and London coach-road, along which previous generations haddriven with what cheer they might, after a day or so spent in sailing from Kingstown to Holyhead. Many an Irish member thrilled here with inward rehearsal of the peroration that should shake Westminster; many a grudging rebel eye looked for the first time at the roadside life of a country whose beauty would put Ireland on her mettle to excel, whose careful tending showed national pride in a form which probably had not before presented itself to the rebel mind. Patriot or undergraduate, genius or duellist, the best that Ireland had to give swung along this road towards London to the tune of sixteen hoofs; the people of no account stayed at home in those days, and when genius travels nowadays, third class in the North Wall train, it could wish that they still did so.

The spell of that older time hung unbroken on the broad road, with the river soliloquising, deep-throated, in the ravine; the time when wind and limb did the work in a primitive way, and every stage saw the perfected relation of man and horse.

A swish, a whirr, the sharp sting of a bell, and two black-caped cyclists were upon us from the opening of a by-road, like two humpbacked monstrosities flying out of the book of Heraldry. The next thing that I saw with any distinctness was the mud squirming through my fingers as I clutched the surface of the road in an endeavour to get my legs clear of the saddle; and the next, as Tommy and I rose simultaneously to our feet, was Miss O’Flannigan and her Tom retiring to the horizon at the rate of twenty miles an hour. The cyclists were also retiring, in the opposite direction, at about sixty miles an hour. Had Tommy been more practised in the art of pivoting suddenly on his hind-legs while trotting downhill, I should probably have been following in Miss O’Flannigan’s wake: as it was, an hysterical “slip up” had been the result, and a final wallowing in the mire. My further impressions of the noble old Holyhead coach-road may be summed up in the statement that its mud is white and is mixed with size to give it adhesive quality.

“I clutched the surface of the road.”

By the time that I had emptied some of it from my gloves, and rough-dried the saddle and Tommy with a wisp of grass, Miss O’Flannigan had returned, minus the gingham, and with girlishly floating hair. Our subsequent entry into Bettwys was mercifully cloaked by deluge, but it was difficult to bear with dignity the successive eyes of a walking party, trudging in single file away from it—the same walking party on whom we had bestowed a scornful compassion as we met them in the airless heat near Beddgelert. Even on such a day as this the villas and lodging-houses of Bettwys could look nothing else but flawlessly clean and smart, with their clear grey-stone walls and white-frilled window curtains. Between them and the speeding river (whose bridge and island were, even at a glance, familiar as the mainstay of many water-colour exhibitions) we huddled in downpour to the hotel of our choice; not the Royal Oak, with its legion of waiters and its private road to the railway station, but to the more sympathetic Glan Aber, where the windows were innocent of therain-bound tourist lady, and the hall unhaunted of her husband.

In half an hour a great part of the sopping bulk that had paused, dripping, in the hall while the landlady decided to take a trade risk and admit it as guests, had been transferred to the kitchen in armfuls, to the laundress in yet further armfuls, and what remained (in my case) was in bed, drinking hot tea that was yellow with cream. The remnant of Miss O’Flannigan was draped with gloomy grace in plaid-shawls of Dissenting Chapel odour, lent, to the best of our remembrance, by the chambermaid’s mother.

“Not by appointment do we meet delight and joy, They heed not our expectancy——” And so also not by appointment do we meet the ideal chambermaid—unless, indeed, we are fortunate enough to be her young man—but we met her that afternoon at the Glan Aber Hotel, and hope some day to do it again.

It was late that evening before the hold-alls arrived from Llanberis, and therefore our toilettesfortable-d’hôtewere, as the fashion articles say, dainty confections, composed of a damp habit-skirt, a mackintosh, shirts hot from the hotel laundry, and the severest of the plaid-shawls. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the sole other occupant of the hotel, a godly young amateur photographer, should have awaited us somewhat nervously as we swept through the long room towards a table laid for three, and should have carved the soup and fish with a trembling hand. With the chicken, however, the photographer had almost ceased to look round for our keeper, and a conversation about Thornton Pickard shutters and time-exposures was beginning to thrive at the hands of Miss O’Flannigan, who affects some acquaintance with these things. The evening finished with all the domesticity imparted by a fire in the drawing-room and a display of negatives, Kodaks, shoulder-straps, and other ingredients of a photographic walking tour. We felt that we were a godsend to this good and lonely youth, and parted from him with every hope that on the morrow he would askto be permitted the privilege of photographing the Tommies and the expedition generally. It was therefore crushing to find on the morrow that he had unexpectedly fled at daybreak, with all his worldly possessions. He did not know it, but he was obeying the decree that, Claudian-like, we should blight the fortunes of every hotel we stayed at, and reign in malign monopoly of coffee-room andtable-d’hôte.

Hithertofarewell had been slightly said, with a few backward looks of good feeling, a few civil wishes for an indefinite return. But at Bettwys, for the first time, and perhaps also because it was—of this vagrant expedition—so near the last, parting gave pain. Turning on the face of a hill we looked back over the valley and across the flitting showers to the peaks of Snowdon and Moel Siabod, a retrospect to be remembered and thirstily to be desired in other summers. Darkly and greenly the woods sank into every cleft, or rose with the piled-up landscape till the cold breast of Snowdon was half hidden behind them. A river, whose name is quite immaterial, plunged uproariously down to the five crooked arches of Pont-y-Pair bridge in Bettwys, then, finding itself suddenly in good society, pulled itself together and swam tense and flat round a curve to present itself decorously to what I think we are safe in asserting to be the river Conway. It was true that half-pay generals and forlorn honeymoon couples haunted the bridge and hung round the post-office, that “well-appointed conveyances” were daily braying forth with horns the multitudinous entry of the tourist, also that the glass was falling; none the less we should thankfully have turned the Tommies down the hill again and remained without purpose or limit at Bettwys. Then, indeed, might many periods have been instructively framed around the names of the Miner’s Bridge, the Swallow Falls, and Dolwyddelan Castle, all of which the guide-book assured us with chaste esteem were “well worthy of a visit.” All that now remained was to turn away from the parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back, and pace lingering forth towards Corwen.

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