I
For half a day there was now a world of snow, a myriad flakes falling, a myriad rising, and nothing more save the sound of rivers; and now a world of green undulating hills that smiled in the lap of the grey mountains, over which moved large clouds, sometimes tumultuous and grey, sometimes white and slow, but always fringed with fire. When the snow came, the mountains dissolved and were not. When the mountains were born again out of the snow, the snow seemed but to have polished the grass, and put a sharper sweetness in the song of the thrush and the call of the curlew, and left the thinnest of cirrus clouds upon the bare field, where it clung only to the weeds. So, in this dialogue of mountain and snow, nothing was easily remembered or even credible, until I came to the foot of a hill which hazels and oak trees crowned. The snow was disappearing and the light came precipitately through it and struck the hill. All the olive and silver and leaden stems of oak and hazel glowed together and made a warm haze and changed the hill into an early sunset cloud out of which came the cooing of wood-pigeons. The mountains lay round, grey, faint, unimportant, about to pass away; the country that lay between them and the hill was still in mist. So the hill rose up crowned and garlanded like a statue in a great hall of some fair woman of whom one wonders what art can persuade her to stay on that cold pedestal for ever. The wood-pigeons cooed continually; and there was the hill, using all the sunlight, as a chrysanthemum will do in a London street. It lived; it appealed to all the sense and brain together; it was splendid; it was Spring's, and I do not know of anything else that mattered or was, for the time. Very sweet it was to see the world as but a shining green hill and a shining brown wood, with a wood-pigeon for a voice, while all other things that had been were gone like the snow. That there was also a wind I knew only because it brought with it the scent of a farmyard behind: for it had motion but no sound. Something in me was content to see the hill as a monument of Spring that might endure for ever, that the wood-pigeons might coo their song; and saw that it made possible the sound of bells in an evening landscape, of wheat in sheaves, and quiet beeches and doves among them. Yet I climbed to the wood, and saw that last year's leaves were too thick yet for a flower to pierce them; and that same wind had found a brittle, dead ash-tree in which to sing a cold November song; and the pigeons clapped their wings and flew away. And that cold November song made me remember against myself the old legend of the child who played with fairies, but came once with her mother and saw them no more.
COMING NIGHT, NEAR BEDDGELERT
There were, says the story, at a small harbour belonging to Nefyn, some houses in which several families formerly lived; the houses are there still, but nobody lives in them now. There was one family there to which a little girl belonged; they used to lose her for hours every day; so her mother was very angry with her for being so much away. "I must know," said she, "where you go for your play." The girl answered that it was to Pin-y-Wig, "The Wig point," which means a place to the west of the Nefyn headland; it was there, she said, she played with many children. "They are very nice children,—much nicer," said the child, "than I am." "I must know whose children they are," was the reply; and one day the mother went with her little girl to see the children. It was a distance of about a quarter of a mile to Pin-y-Wig, and after climbing the slope and walking a little along the top they came in sight of the Pin. It is from this Pin that the people of Pen-yr-Allt got water, and it is from there they get it still. Now after coming near the Pin the little girl raised her hands with joy at the sight of the children. "Oh, mother," said she, "their father is with them to-day; he is not with them always; it is only sometimes that he is." The mother asked the child where she saw them. "There they are, mother, running down to the Pin, with their father sitting down." "I see nobody, my child," was the reply, and great fear came upon the mother; she took hold of the child's hand in terror, and it came to her mind at once that they were the Tylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin-y-Wig: the mother had heard that the Tylwyth Teg exchanged people's children with their own.
ABERGLASLYN
II
Yesterday, the flower of the wood-sorrel and the song of the willow-wren came together into the oak woods, and higher up on the mountain, though they were still grey, the larches were misty and it was clearly known that soon they would be green. The air was full of the bleating of lambs, and though there was a corpse here and there, so fresh and blameless was it that it hardly spoiled the day. The night was one of calm and breathing darkness; nor was there any moon; and therefore the sorrowful darkness and angularity of early spring valleys by moonlight, when they have no masses of foliage to make use of the beams, did not exist. It was dark and warm, and from the invisible orchard, where snow yet lay under the stone wall, came a fragrance which, though it was not May, brought into our minds the song that was made for May in another orchard high among hills:
Have you ne'er waked in the grey of the day-dawn