"She'll be a first-class miting in tip-top speeches. All the drapers and dairies shall be there in crowds. Three sirs shall come."
"I am choked with engagements," said Ben. "I am preaching very busy now just."
"Well-well. Asked I did for you are a clean Cymro bach. As I repeat, only leading lines in speakers shall be there. Come now into the drawing-room and I'll give you an intro to the Missus Enos-Harries. In evening dress she is—chik Paris Model. The invoice price was ten-ten."
"Wait a bit," Ben remarked. "I would be glad if I could speak."
"Perhaps the next time we give you the invite. The Cymrodorion shall be in the miting."
"As you plead, try I will."
"Stretching a point am I," Harries said. "This is a favor for you to address this glorious miting where the Welsh drapers will attend and the Missus Enos-Harries will sing 'Land of my Fathers.'"
Ben withdrew from his fellows for three days, and on the third day—which was that of the Saint—he put on him a frock coat, and combed down his mustache over the blood-red swelling on his lip; and he cleaned his teeth. Here are some of the sayings that he spoke that night:
"Half an hour ago we were privileged to listen to the voice of a lovely lady—a voice as clear as a diamond ring. It inspired us one and all with a hireath for the dear old homeland—for dear Wales, for the land of our fathers and mothers too, for the land that is our heritage not by Act of Parliament but by the Act of God....
"Who ownss this land to-day? The squaire and the parshon. By what right? By the same right as the thief who steals your silk and your laces, and your milk and butter, and your reddy-made blousis. I know a farm of one hundred acres, each rod having been tamed from heatherland into a manna of abundance. Tamed by human bones and muscles—God's invested capital in His chosen children. Six months ago this land—this fertile and rich land—was wrestled away from the owners. The bones of the living and the dead were wrestled away. I saw it three months ago—a wylderness. The clod had been squeesed of its zweat. The land belonged to my father, and his father, and his father, back to countless generations....