The children are for the most part either black-haired and dark eyed, or red-haired, freckled, and snub-nosed: but some are pure Saxon:
“Blue-eyed, white-bosomed, with long golden hair.”
All wear their best clothes, and ribbons, and the maidens know it. They too are uneasy, and they discuss my appearance in their own tongue, which leaves me neither elated nor depressed: as when a Venetian gondolier scathingly delineates his passenger in local patois to another boatman: but the passenger’s withers are unwrung. Only when I venture into the Infants’ room I hear a murmur from a four-year-old, which the Rector intercepts and translates to me. It was, if I remember rightly, “Welwch-’i-farf-o,” “look at his beard.” I admit that in those days I had a beard which reached to the third button of my waistcoat: it had an extraordinary fascination for infants.
I call over the names of the fifteen infants, and find great difficulty in distinguishing between Mary Jones, Ty-gwyn; Mary Jones, Hendre; and Mary Jones, The Red Lion. One of them is absent, and her name must be struck off: Mrs. Evans will not admit that it is immaterial which name is cancelled, so long as she gets sixteen shillings for the two survivors: if John Jones, The Red Lion, heard that his Mary was wrongfully marked absent, there would be letters in the paper, and a meeting at Capel Carmel. Yes, sure! Mary Ty-gwyn is sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
Then I lose my heart to Gwen, aged four, and thereby win Mrs. Evans’ heart. It was Gwen, I find, who commented on my beard, and she is still so wholly absorbed in contemplation of it, that my addresses are unheeded. As I stoop down to press my suit in a language that she does not in the least understand—but the language of Love is universal—she makes a sudden grab at the object of her admiration, to see whether it is real. The other babes hold their breath in terror; but finding that Gwen does not swell up and die, that no she-bears appear, and that I am laughing, they break into a long ripple of choking mirth, in the midst of which I escape.
I return to the main-room, where the fifty “elder scholars” await me. “Will I hear a song?” Certainly I will. Is it the “Men of Harlech”? It is; and it is rendered with a vigour that leaves nothing to be desired. Mr. Evans volunteers another of a more plaintive character, and we have a native lament in a minor key, which leads me hastily to assure him that the grant is now secure.
The Rector is a keen Shakespearean scholar, and he mutters to me:
“This passion and the death of a near friend would go near to make a man look sad.”
I cap his quotation:
“An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him: I had as lief have heard the night raven.”