Seven English Cities

by William Dean Howells

VI

At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was the difference of the people from the people over the English border in their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful, they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.

The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King’s Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too literally.

Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats like the men’s. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.