Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried
Be not!
They lay beneath; the snow was over them. It was hard to walk while all things had thus, in Asiatic phrase, perfected their repose. When the distant chimney appeared again, it was as incredible as a thing seen in a dream when one knows that it is a dream. It interrupted the perfection of the whole, as I did, but only as the smell of a mouse may spoil the beauty of an old room which has been left for a dead man alone, for some time after the funeral. The farther I went, the more immense became the extent of hills ahead and around. Their whiteness made the sky gloomy, as if with coming night. The furthest were grey with distance. In the cold that overtook my swiftest walking I could not put by the imagination that I could see myself travelling over more endless white hills, lost, to my own knowledge, and yet beyond my own power to save. And, again, I thought of all the hills beyond those I saw, until even the immensity before me became more awful, because it suggested the whole, as the light of one candle by the organist suggests the whole cathedral at midnight.
And then, though I did not know it, a change began, and dimly, not hopefully, as when one thinks one hears the double click of a latch in a house which strangers inhabit now, I saw that the sun began to set, and it was red. I knew that red: it belonged to the old world: it was the colour of the oast houses in Kent. A window, two miles off, caught the light and blazed. A bell told the hour in a church, and shook some of the snow from the belfry in a mist. I warmed myself in the breath of a flock of sheep. I knew that I heard the voice of a stream which had been with me for a long way. Borrow, I remembered, knew the stream. Borrow! I was at home again.
WELSH FARM, NEAR LLANBERIS
Slowly the fire and the ale constructed the world again, and though I could still see the snow from the hearth of the inn, it was as impotent as the frail moon which was convoyed down among the moorlands by dark and angry clouds, while I read—as now my reader does—this passage from Wild Wales:—
"'I suppose you follow some pursuit besides bardism?' said I; 'I suppose you farm?'
"'I do not farm,' said the man in grey. 'I keep an inn.'
"'Keep an inn?' said I.