BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

A RIDING TOUR IN NORTH WALES

BY

MARTIN ROSS
AND
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE
AUTHORS OF 'AN IRISH COUSIN,' 'THROUGH CONNEMARA,'
'THE REAL CHARLOTTE,' ETC. ETC.


WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
BY E. Œ. SOMERVILLE



WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCV

ILLUSTRATIONS.

“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” said the ironmonger, gazing out into the glaring street through a doorway festooned with tin mugs and gridirons, “but I think it was the gentleman as played the kettle-drum that rode him.” His eyes seemed to follow some half-remembered pageant, though outwardly they rested on the languid salutations of the saddler’s dog and the hotel collie on the opposite pavement.

Miss O’Flannigan, who looked and was too hot for conversation, remained impassive where she sat, on the top of an “Empress” cottage stove, with her gaze fixed on the zinc pails that hung like Chinese lanterns from the ceiling.

“Unfortunately we shall not take a kettle-drum,” I replied, hesitatingly.

“Well, no, of course,” admitted the ironmonger; “but I assure you that a pony that’s bin in the yeomanry band won’t be partikler as to traction-engines or sech. You ladies could play any instrument when ridin’ ’im.”

Miss O’Flannigan laughed sardonically from the “Empress” stove, and Mr Griffiths’ attitude of mild bewilderment changed to wounded dignity.

“Perhaps Mr Williams, the chemist, could oblige you with sech animals as you require,” he said, with the stiffness of one of his own swing-door hinges; “but there isn’t sech a cob in Welshpool as what my cob is.”

We temporised with Mr Griffiths and proceeded to the chemist’s, noticing as we did so a determination of the inhabitants of Welshpool to their shop doors, while the loafers round the stone pedestal of the gas lamp that seems to form the focus of Welshpool life, turned to look after us like sunflowers to the sun. Further away than ever went the memory of the thud of ‘bus-horses’ feet on wood pavement, the hot glitter of harness and livery buttons at Hyde Park Corner, the precarious dive across Piccadilly, and all the other environments of yesterday. The heat of noon lay here like a spell on the street, and Welshpool, for the most part, sat in its shady back parlours in comfortable lethargy.

Like the other shops, Mr Williams, the chemist’s, was cool and empty, with the air of a place where it is always dinner-hour hanging drowsily over it. Indeed, the pimpled cheek of the apprentice—why are pimples the common wear of chemists’ assistants?—was still inflated by a mouthful when he made his appearance, and a sound as of dumpling impeded the voice in which he told us that Mr Williams had a pony, and that the mistress would speak to us herself.

“Mr Williams was away,” explained Mrs Williams, “drawing teeth and measuring for new ones; and y’know what a job that is,” she concluded, examining Miss O’Flannigan’s smile with the eye of a connoisseur. Miss O’Flannigan relapsed somewhat abruptly into gloom.

“I have a pair of real little beauties,” went on the chemist’s wife, beaming at us between minarets of Eno’s Fruit Salt and Mellin’s Food, “just the thing for London work. I’ll have them round at the hotel for you in ten minutes.”

We were conscious of social shrinkage as the work for which we required the ponies was explained; a fortnight’s road work in Wales, with the proviso that the animals would have to carry packs—“large packs,” added Miss O’Flannigan—held a suggestion of bagmen, not to say tinkers. But Mrs Williams’ stable sank unhesitatingly to the level of our needs. She had yet another pony, three years old, thirteen hands high, steady, “and bin ridden with the Yeomanry,” she ended, reassuringly.

From the eye that Miss O’Flannigan cast upon me I knew that her mind was, like mine, occupied with a vision of the Yeomanry mounted, like cyclists, on “dwarf-safeties,” and we ventured to ask whether the St Bernard, whose eyes gleamed from the dark corner of the shop where he lay, pantingly protruding a tongue like a giant slice of ham, had been ridden during the training. The jest had a high success, and a suetty giggle from somewhere near the open door of the parlour apprised us that this gem of Irish humour was not lost on the apprentice.

Before we returned to the hotel several things had been accomplished. We were possessors of the chemist’s pony for a fortnight; we had bakingly retraced our steps to the ironmonger, and by dint of remaining immutable on the top of the cottage stove, had made a like bargain with him; and we had interested Welshpool more whole-souledly than any event since the election and the last circus. Coolness and peace awaited us at the Royal Oak Inn, with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days, wonderfully striking to an Irish eye, accustomed to connect antiquity with dirt and dilapidation. We have nothing hale and honourable like these hostelries, with their centuries of landlord ancestry: we have the modern hotel after its kind, and also the unspeakable pothouse, with creeping things after their kind; but antiquity, if such there be, is a poor, musty ghost, lingering among broken furniture and potsherds, to sadden the eyes of such as can discern it.

Ireland seemed a long way off, while we lunched largely and languidly on fruit and cream, and wondered how we were going to ride through four counties in heat of this kind. A sense of inadequacy grew upon us like a slight indigestion, or, perhaps, it came to us in that guise, and the fussy clatter of ponies’ hoofs in the yard below had a ring in it of the inexorable. Miss O’Flannigan sharpened a pencil and began to make notes, evidently to restore her moral tone,—notes about Welshpool, she said, antiquities, and such things; but as subsequently these proved to consist of the entry, “Saturday, June 10, ‘Black and White,’ lunch, Academy, headache, tea, tried on, &c.,” with a bulbous profile of the ironmonger, her method of working back to ancient history must have been mystic and gradual.

While we thus sat dubious of ourselves and all things, expecting to hear that the chemist and the ironmonger had alike thought better of it, there was a shuffling of many feet in the hall, and the door opened to its widest to admit an immense old lady, advancing with the solemnity of a hearse, while two daughters of some fifty-five or sixty hard-won years moved beside her like pall-bearers, supporting each a weighty elbow on their lean arms. A third daughter walked behind, carrying a white dog of the Spitz breed. As a foundation-stone sinks to its resting-place, so, and with a like deliberation, was the old lady lowered into the largest and, indeed, the only possible chair; one daughter shut the window, another rang the bell, and a meal of fried beef-steak, onions, and bottled stout was ordered. The temperature of the room seemed perceptibly to rise, and Miss O’Flannigan and I communed by glances as to whether we had energy to get up and go away.

“Eh! it’s warm, vera warm,” said the old lady, addressing the company in general, but ceaselessly examining Miss O’Flannigan and me with eyes as blue and bright as those of any heroine of inexpensive fiction; “it mak’s a body p’spire vera free, that it dew. But ye dew enjoy it——”

She spoke with a Yorkshire accent as broad as the foot which, in its cloth shoe and white stocking, was handsomely displayed below her skirt hem—and we apologise for probable mistakes in the reproduction by an Irish hand of that sturdy, grumbling drawl.

“Ah’m come all the way oop fra’ Yorkshire for a too-er,” she went on; “t’ yoong folks like a change,” she indicated her grey-haired attendants, “but Wales is a bit dool when ye come out for a holiday. Eh, Scarbro’s the gay, bonny place! Eh, but ye miss a treat if ye don’t see Scarbro!”

She held us with her glittering eye, and the eulogy of Scarborough proceeded with the burr of a noontide bee, by promenades, hotels, family histories of friends who kept lodgings in the best terraces, and many other highways and byways; while the three daughters and the white dog sat and filled in the mesmeric effect, immovable as scenery. A message that the ponies were in the yard came at last to our relief, like good news from a far country, and with the activity of a hunting morning we made our exit in the wake of the waitress, who, at the Royal Oak, as at many other Welsh inns, has worthily replaced the waiter and the cheerless glory of his evening suit. The needed fillip had been given; the present moment, with its release and its ponies, sparkled suddenly, and that Wales which the old Yorkshire woman found so “dool” by comparison with Scarborough, lay awaiting us in restored glamour.

The large, clean yard, with its respectable coaching and fox-hunting associations, was acquiring a new experience. The loafers had detached themselves from the lamp-post, the tide of commerce had flowed from the shops to stand round the stable doors, and discuss in the guttural, shrewish Welsh tongue what manner of she-yeomanry they might be who thus requisitioned Welshpool ponies for their own undivulged purposes. There was a dead silence as we came forth, hobbling and waddling in our fettering safety habit-skirts—a silence, as we hope, of admiration, but we have not inquired into it. The ponies were there—a bay of a little over fourteen hands, a chestnut dun of a hand smaller, both ill-fitted by their big saddles, both possessed of a generous contour that told of long summer days of revelling in the young grass, and summer nights of serious gobbling of it when the flies were asleep. Mr Williams the chemist, and Mr Griffiths the ironmonger, stood at their heads, and began a species of funeral oration upon their virtues, and upon the pangs of parting from them; while an attendant, with his knee against the side of the bay, and his head buried under the flap of the saddle, exerted what strength was in him to overcome the pangs of meeting exhibited by the girths and their buckles: nothing remained for us except to mount, and to trust that we should be spared disaster in the eyes of Welshpool.

Miss O’Flannigan asked the name of the bay pony, and having ascertained that it was Tom, commanded that he should be brought to the mounting-block. Tom, a three-year-old of precocious gravity, erstwhile bearer of the kettle-drum and possessed of the serious good looks of one of Mrs Sherwood’s curates, reluctantly approached the hoary limestone block, with a horrified eye fixed on Miss O’Flannigan as she awaited him in her safety skirt. Persuasion failed to bring him within three yards of a garment which, as he doubtless expressed it, would have made Mrs Sherwood turn in her grave; and Miss O’Flannigan was finally pitched on to his back from an indefinite spot near the stable door, whither, with one foot in the stirrup, she had hopped in pursuit of her steed. It was damping to find that the name of the chemist’s pony was Tommy, but we felt sure that in the first few minutes of our first journey we should think of something clever with which to re-christen both. We subsequently spent several hours of several journeys in this endeavour, but their baptismal names have not as yet been improved on.

“He iss a little unused to the town, marm,” said the chemist’s stable-boy, as Tommy submitted with unexpected calm to the infliction of my weight; “but he iss goot—yes, indeed!”

The next moment I was pursuing Miss O’Flannigan up the street like the conventional pattern of a flash of lightning. Happily, the houses, carts, barrels, and other objects possessed of terrors for Tommy alternated on either side with tolerable regularity, so that one shy acted as a corrective to the last; but these advantages were denied to Miss O’Flannigan. Her Tom fled along before me, cantering with the fore and trotting widely with the hind legs, and making startling attempts to turn in at unexpected side entrances—attempts that were only frustrated by serious effort on the part of his rider.

It was somewhere during this rush through Welshpool and its environs, while the saddles rolled and our faces blazed, that we were conscious of passing a building like a Methodist chapel, from which came men’s and women’s voices, singing in harmony. It was only a moment’s hearing, but it lived, ringing and resonant, in our ears, and is notable still to us as our first experience of Welsh voices. When, at sunset, we returned dishevelled and hairpinless, but masters of the situation, Miss O’Flannigan had remembered several quotations from the poets to express the effect of these keen, strong voices flung out into the sleepy afternoon. I, regarding the heat-stained coats of the Tommies and Miss O’Flannigan’s back-hair, could remember nothing except the conversation of two men at a race meeting in Galway—

“Did ye see them skelping round by Glan corner?”

“I did not, faith.”

“Then ye seen nothing.”

CHAPTER II.

There are no suburbs to Welshpool. Practical, like its countrywomen, it does not trail a modish skirt across the meadows; the woods and hedgerows run down to it, but it will not change its working-dress and come up from its hollow to be idle with them. Of this, indeed, we were not disposed to complain, when at some three of the clock on the next afternoon we started on the first stage of our journey. We had received, in the act of departure, an amount of interest and attention that would have satiated, not to say embarrassed, a sandwich-man—from the congregated friends of the chemist and ironmonger, from the old Yorkshire woman (framed like a Holbein behind the glass of a firmly closed window), from the exponents of fashion in baggy breeches and slim gaiters who habitually “practised at the bar” of the hotel, from the carriage of an unknown magnate, and from the pit and gallery section which had early possessed itself of the best places on the central lamp-post. The subtler observation of villa residences was at least spared us, the vulture eye of the tradesman’s widow behind the lace curtain, the scorn of the offspring of the dentist or the auctioneer.

Powys Castle and its woods towered aloof in a shimmer of heat, as unaware of town and tourist as the cattle within its gates. The grey houses of the town became smaller and older looking; cats sat on the doorstep and mused on the deceitfulness of things, overawing the languid dogs in the eternal supremacy of mind over matter; and the flame of sunshine blazed tangibly round us and all things. Our last impression of Welshpool is of its oldest house, a black-beamed cottage, lolling and bulging, crooked and bowed in every line; impossible as to perspective, but strong and stable beyond all houses in the town—so the town says. Then the hedgerows, and the white road stretching westward into the unknown. Elder-bushes, with their creamy discs; dog-roses of every shade of pink gazing at us with soft innumerable faces; honeysuckle in thickets; perfumes lonely and delicate, perfumes blended and intoxicating. The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to the saddles.

The mention of the hold-alls disperses like an east wind all ideas of the indolent and the picturesque. Briefly they may be described as was a kitchen-maid in a Galway household by an enraged fellow-servant—“She’s able to put any one that’d be with her into a decay.” We had spent the morning in packing them, in repacking them, in acrid argument as to whether Miss O’Flannigan’s painting-box (apparently made of lead and filled with stones) would fit in my hold-all with the teapot, tin kettle, india-rubber bath, shooting-boots, drugs, and other angular things which had been already bestowed in it; in punching fresh holes in the straps, in going to the saddler to have more “dees” put on the off-sides of the saddles, and finally in a harrowing parting with our portmanteaus, which, labelled “Dolgelly, per goods train,” had been delivered to the hand of the boots. It was the burning of the ships; and while the smart, tightly-belted hold-alls were hoisted like plethoric grooms to their saddles, we looked back to the portmanteaus, and said, with a hope no larger than Brutus had, “If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed.”

For about two miles we crawled at a walk in the heat,—the drab Tommy niggling, shuffling, and plodding; the bay Tom “dishing,” crossing his legs, and stumbling, but both absolutely laid out for goodness. Lulled to a false security, we ambled thus up and down the slopes, and prosed a little to each other about the scenery: plump,

knobby hills, such as one would cut out of dough with a tumbler, with strips of wood straddling over them; rich valleys with their sides padded with dark-green trees, all complete and devoid of relation to each other, but all similar, like a picture-gallery full of replicas of the same landscape. This, we said, was not the kind of thing we had come to Wales to see.

A shaded stretch of road tempted us at length to urge the Tommies to their own wild trot, and to its vagaries we and the hold-alls rose and fell, bumped and joggled with what grace we might. Roadside heaps of stones, that had till now been merely matter for composed inquiry to the Tommies, became at this pace fraught with all supernatural powers and malign intents, and we cannoned violently and often, as Tom swerved, wild-eyed, from one of these objects of terror, or as Tommy, the ignoble, turned with incredible swiftness and endeavoured to flee home to the chemist. We persevered to the top of a steep descent, where the white dusty road fell away from our feet, and there slackened as there came into view a cart drawn by four giant horses with solemn bowed heads and huge legs that gave them the effect of wearing sailor’s trousers, tight at the knee and full at the ankle. The trunk of a great elm lay on the cart, a “vibrating star,” as George Eliot has described the prone advance of such another tree, and on top of it sat a man in a blue linen coat, looking as unimportant as a squirrel in relation to the mammoth creatures who were accepting his authority. We looked at him with respect as the quivering bole of the elm-tree drew slowly level with us, but he regarded us not at all. His gaze was fixed on my hold-all, from whose gaping mouth, as we suddenly became aware, a sponge-bag and the spout of the tea-kettle were protruding.

“Hoy!” said the carter, pointing with his brass-ringed whip at something on the road behind us.

It was Miss O’Flannigan’s india-rubber cup, a noisome vessel from which she indifferently partook of tea, bovril, and claret. We dismounted, and the saddles, released from the compensating balance of the weight that experience had already taught us to bring to bear on the stirrups, obeyed instantly the four-stone drag of each hold-all, and began to turn very slowly and steadily to the off-side. We collected the cup and some other scattered valuables, and then, while the flies closed in round us, we began the long strife with straps and buckles. The Tommies sidled, stamped, and snapped ungovernably; while the flies devoured us and them impartially, the girths were dragged to their last holes, the hold-alls repacked and strapped on again, and the reign of suffering that ceased not till our journey’s end was fairly inaugurated.

Cannoffice was our destination, Llanfair was to be our stopping-place for tea. I almost hesitate to mention that Llanfair is but seven miles from Welshpool; but it is, perhaps, better to state at once that we, and, still more, the Tommies, were above the vulgarities of record-breaking, unless, indeed, we can lay claim to our daily journeys being the shortest hitherto performed by any Welsh tourist. It must have been five o’clock when we rode down the stony hill beside the no less dry and stony river-bed, where at any time, except in this rainless year, the water must swirl pleasantly below the grey village of Llanfair. Welsh villages are composed of nearly equal parts of inns and chapels, so that such names as “The Cross Foxes,” “Rehoboth,” “The Goat,” “The Grapes,” “Addoldy,” “Salem,” and “Bethesda,” greet the traveller in startling succession. We crossed the humpbacked bridge, above the fevered bed of the river, where the children sat and played at giving parties with many long drowned crockeries, and we rode the length of the little street and selected the last of the inns that clung to its steep sides.

It was the glimpse of oak settles and panels, and gleams of old brass and copper, that we saw through the open door of the Wynnstay Arms that turned the scale, already tilted by the vision of a fat ostler boy with gold earrings, who grinned

from the stable opposite. That he spoke English about as well as a French porter at Calais was subsequently a drawback, when it came to words like surcingle and hold-all, and the beautiful kitchen with the tiled floor and the high settles (and we are compelled to add, the spittoons) was not permitted to us. For us was reserved the fusty decorum of an upper parlour, obviously consecrate to domestic ceremonies,—funeral cards and the plaster ornament of a wedding-cake formed the chimney ornaments,—to the rare female visitor, and to a vow that the windows should not be opened. We cannot, however, look back otherwise than with affection to the tea which presently came to us, to the cream and the bread-and-butter, and to the fact that it was the first and last “plain tea” which Wales supplied us with at sixpence each.

The journey to Cannoffice was resumed with reluctance on our part and on the part of the Tommies, who were beginning to think that the thing was getting past a joke and looked horribly like business. Our best sympathies were given to them as we fought our way along the remainder of that afternoon’s sixteen miles, decimating uselessly the hungry host of horse-flies that every hedge recruited, flying from them at a ludicrous full gallop, waving them back with branches of trees; perhaps it would be truer to say that the Tommies had our second-best sympathies. The noblest compassion of our hearts was lavished on ourselves. The Tommies certainly played their part in the strife with ingenuity that, in some degree, made up for the inadequacy of their pigmy tails. They kicked flies off their stomachs and shoulders as artlessly and easily as dogs; they bit their legs down to the pastern; they rubbed themselves against the delicious angularities of the hold-alls; they buried their faces in our habits in a way that would have been maddening, if it had not appealed so torturingly to our pity.

It was eight o’clock before we reached Cannoffice, and the brilliant sky of summer had lost but little of its radiancy. We and the Tommies had perceptibly lost ours, but still the thing was done. We had passed from among the lumpy green hills, and had, by slow ascent, reached more open country, which had a tendency and a meaning in its strong, large, upward curve. Already the faint ridge of the mountains was on the horizon, and the balm of the uplands was

in the air. The old Cannoffice Inn looked pleasantly at us out of its ivied windows and low porch; we took it for the vicarage till we saw upon it the mystic sign of the winged wheel which marks the approval of the cyclist club. In the evening, when we wandered between the dense beech and yew hedges of the garden, or sat in a dark arbour and heard the cattle cropping the dewy grass, the ineffable pastoralities of the place made themselves felt. Children and dogs were playing noisily on a hill opposite; out in the unseen hamlet behind a grove of pine-trees there was now and then a distant snatch of voices singing in harmony; and garden perfumes, cooled in night air, spoke of peace and of a hundred sleeping roses. We forgot that our legs were stiffening into acute angles, that our foreheads had been phrenologically remodelled by horse-fly bites, and that our house-shoes were circling round Wales in a luggage-train. And that, I think, was how I caught one of my very finest colds in my head.

CHAPTER III.

Next morning Miss O’Flannigan went out sketching. The casual reader may skim this information permissively, as a harmless, picturesque thing, very proper for young ladies; but to the companion of Miss O’Flannigan’s travels it has other aspects. For example, the aspect of Miss O’Flannigan herself, as she sat on a paling with her feet tucked up, her hat tilted over a scarlet face, and her teeth clenched on a spare paint-brush; or mine, as I leaned on the rail of a footbridge over against her, in the furnace heat of the sun, with what negligence remains to the model who has stiffened for twenty minutes in the attitude so lightly and luxuriously undertaken. It must be admitted, however, that the cold caught the night before

was, in that unrelenting blaze, slowly baked away. Probably the children who sat along the banks of the stream and discussed us in Welsh saw it rise like a mist and melt into the blue: Miss O’Flannigan did not see it, but when painting she sees nothing but values. Ordinary humanity does not see values any more than fairies, but Miss O’Flannigan and other artists do.

It was afternoon when we forsook the simplicities of Cannoffice, and went forth to the unknown and the unpronounceable. Five minutes’ stroll will exploit the place, with its half-dozen ancient cottages, its “Zion,” and its post-office, where English is a difficulty, and the forwarding of a letter to a given address a problem too deep to be grappled with. But Cannoffice does not seem greatly to care whether its visitors stay minutes or months. Incorruptibly sylvan and indomitably Welsh, it shakes off the dust of each tourist season, and returns to its solitary and sufficing ways of life, and there are moments when one could wish to return with it.

Up into the west we went, along a road hilly and pastoral, lonely and hot. After some miles of it we dived into a fir-grove and emerged into a region of a strangely different sort. Connemara it might have been—the back of Connemara by the Erriff river—such and of such a greenness were the hills; so amongst them, along the marshy level, ran the unfenced road. Not a tree broke the tender barrenness of the outlines: big and mild, with the magnanimous curves of the brows of an elephant, the hills stood clothed in the sweet short grass; and among their hollows grazed sheep and black cattle, whose smallness may have been native, or may have been a deception of that great feeding-ground. We halted there in breezy silences where no horse-fly inhabited, and had an afternoon tea of patriarchal frugality,—a bunch of raisins and a crust of bread cut with Miss O’Flannigan’s pocket-knife, which had last been used for scraping out a tin of soft-soap.

The country closed in round us as we journeyed. Ravines clove the hills, woods ran hardily on the steeps, and stone walls replaced the hedges. The road rose to higher levels, winding parapeted above the ravines, and we began to meet people again—people of a politeness incredible, almost unnerving, to those whose belief in their own appearance has been sapped by various adversities, especially the insecurity of hairpins. Voices were on the hillsides, and once from the bottom of a ravine came up most freshly the lilt of a woman’s song. The words were Welsh, the tune unknown, but all clean and homely romance was borne on the notes of that careless, yet half-melancholy, peasant voice.

Following on this the rattle of a mowing-machine grated upon the farthest edge of silence, and going on towards it we came on an inn, the only one boasted of by the village of Mallwydd.

Thrice we rode to and fro before that humble hostelry, and, but for a weird, pig-styish smell which pervaded the village, had committed ourselves to it. We escaped from the expectant landlady, and applied the Tommies to the mile that remained between us and Dinas Mowddy—having, at all events, discovered that Maäthlooith and Deenas Mawthy were approximately the pronunciations for the two places. After a quarter of an hour we seemed nearer to nothing except a slate-quarry, and we addressed ourselves to a passer-by of majestic respectability on the subject of the Griffith Arms Hotel. This person informed us, with the utmost difficulty and with much pantomime, that “the hotel wass inside—yess indeed,” but beyond this his English did not carry him. In that language he did not know his right hand from his left, and graphic semaphoring on Miss O’Flannigan’s part did not seem to convey anything to his mind,—made him indeed hasten onwards, as one who finds he is entertaining a lunatic unawares.

As a matter of history, the Griffith Arms is inside nothing; it stands bare and square by the roadside, without so much as a garden paling before it. But there is a great deal outside it. A splendid hill, covered to the summit with blue-green pine-trees, looms up in front of it; behind is a long valley, pierced through the heart by a flashing mountain-stream; all round are more hills topped with yet more pine-woods; a snow-peak and a châlet would have made it Switzerland; and doubtless, in these days of enterprise and Earl’s Court, the thing could be arranged.

The hotel seemed to be well stocked with visitors. We had believed ourselves to be before the season, and yet through the shrubs of a garden at the end of the house we saw several ladies in bright-coloured blouses, sitting on garden seats and tending children of all ages, a most edifying and domestic spectacle; and I began to be sorry for Miss O’Flannigan, who had refused to take advice and a walking skirt, and would have to come down to dinner in her habit. Within was a strange emptiness—a large uninhabited coffee-room, an absence of table d’hôte, and an assiduous interest on the part of the landladies, of whom there seemed to be several. Apparently the virtuous band of mother tourists fed early with their progeny, for we dined alone. It seemed a little unusual when presently, from the windows of the coffee-room, we saw the chambermaid (a tall and handsome lady, with manners that quelled any suggestion of familiarity from us) go forth to the pleasure-ground, and, having seated herself, proceed to tell a convulsingly funny story to the tourists. We should have liked to have heard it, but could catch nothing except an inquiry shrieked by an auditor through the drowning laughter, “Did ’e say ‘Ma little duck’?” which awakened a persecuting curiosity while it deepened the mystery.

We examined the Visitors’ Book. No trace of the party was in it, unless it was indirectly hinted at by a cyclist, who, with that happy vein of humour and inventiveness of spelling with which Visitors’ Books are so replete, dilated on the “gossopping gardens” of the hotel. Many things were strange about the Griffith Arms. It was full of unseen presences, of suggestions of an inner life not subordinate to hotel routine, and we roamed solitary in their midst. The big, panelled bath-room, where before dinner I simmered off the fatigues of the ride, had the stale discouraged air of a room that has been left severely to itself. Its breath was heavy with suggestions of the wearing apparel that lined its shelves and hung in decaying grandeur on pegs on the door, and in the bath itself lay a pair of baby’s boots, thick, knitted ones, evidently forgotten there since winter. Miss O’Flannigan’s wardrobe contained an interesting selection of walking-sticks, fishing-tackle, razors, ties of the class known as “Jemima,” and finally, in a separate compartment, innumerable pairs of socks. They belonged to Mr Willy Griffith, the chambermaid explained, with the manner of one who disarms all objections in advance. He stayed at the hotel very often for fishing. She made the same reply when I commented, not unkindly, on the presence of several dozen pairs of socks and six well-greased fishing-boots in my chest of drawers. We did not venture to argue the matter, though it compelled us to distribute the contents of the hold-alls upon the floor.

Early next morning the house rang with the shrieks that accompanied the toilet of many children; and though the coffee-room was at breakfast-time as desolate as ever, the garden presently became filled to a state of crèche-like repletion, and Miss O’Flannigan and I wandered forth in search of a resting-place less fraught with domesticity. We made for the pine-clothed flanks of Moel Dinas, but the heat was terrific—the pine-trees were too young to keep it out, though they were old enough to hide the view; the flies were beyond belief, and the hot perfume from the trees became at last intolerable. We crept back to the hotel and lay about in the shadeless coffee-room, and it was afternoon before we discovered coolness by going down to the river and sitting on damp rocks in a draught under an arch of the new bridge, with the old one picturesquely visible in the background, while the children, the mothers, and the chambermaid