The bells of the cattle on broad, yellow lawns were ringing. Squirrels glowed in the road; the heavy rooks let fall the acorns among the leaves continually. The last beams of the sun reached now a circle of high bracken on a far-off hill, and reached it alone and transfigured it with strong, quiet light; and then made one brown hill seem to be consumed in a golden glow, while the next hill was sombre; and again devoted themselves to a group of beeches that shone ruddy, branch and leaf and bole, and divine and majestic and unrelated to the cattle passing underneath.
The sun went down; wild-duck and moorhen cried and scudded on the calm, winding, silver river at my feet; and in a field beyond, that retained so much liquid and lugubrious light as to seem a green water, some laughing boys in white and yellow played football, without regarding the silver and purple, frosty sky, to which, nevertheless, their shrill voices added something, from which their movements took something, that was glorious and pathetic. And near by, dark oxen with rocking gait thrust their horns up into the sky as they approached the bridge.
OLD ROMAN BRIDGE, NEAR SWANSEA
November
The night had almost come, and the rain had not ceased, among the hills of an unknown country. Behind me, twelve desolate miles of hill and sky away, was a village; and on the way to it, half-a-dozen farms; and before me were three or four houses scattered over two or three miles of winding lanes, with an inn and a church. The parson had just come away from his poultry, and as his wife crossed the road with her apron over her head, I asked where the inn was, and whether it had a room ready in the winter. Two minutes after she had seen me—if she could see me in the dark lane—she had told me that if the inn had no room, I was not to go farther, but to stay at the vicarage. But the inn had a bed to spare, and there was good beer to be had by a great fire in a room shining with brass and pewter, and overhead guns and hams and hanks of wool; and the hostess was jocund, stout, and young, and not only talkative but anxious to be talked to, and she had that maternal kindness—or shall I call it the kindness of a very desirable aunt?—towards strangers, which I have always found in Welsh women, young and old, in the villages and on the moors. So there I stayed and listened to the rain and the fire and the landlady's rich, humming voice uttering and playing strange tricks with English. I was given a change of clothing as if I had asked and paid for it. Then I went to the vicarage, and because I said I loved Welsh hymns and Welsh voices, the vicar and his wife and daughter, without unction or preparation or a piano, sang to me, taking parts, some tremendous hymns and some gay melodies,
Whence banished is the roughness of our years,
which made the rain outside seem April rain. They sang, and told me about the road I was to follow, until I had to go to my inn.
Next day, after paying what I liked at the inn, and promising the hostess that I would learn Welsh, I walked for twenty miles over stony roads gleaming with rain upon the white thorns and bloom on the sloes, and through woods where nothing brooded solemnly over grey moss and green moss on the untrodden, rotten wood, and up dry, ladder-like beds of brooks that served as paths, over peat and brindled grass, and along golden hazel hedges, where grew the last meadow-sweet with herb-robert and harebell and one wild rose, and above little valleys of lichened ash trees; and sometimes beneath me, and sometimes high above, the yellow birches waved in the rain, like sunset clouds fettered to the ground and striving and caracoling in their fetters.
Again I came at nightfall to a strange farmhouse, and was honoured by being asked into the kitchen; again I was given dry clothes. The juicy mutton broke up like game. The farmer sang to me from the Welsh hymn-book and from a collection of old Welsh songs, in a room which was none the worse for a portrait of Miss Maud Millett, "The Soldier's Farewell," and the presence of a fierce-thoughted, mild-eyed young minister, who was the most majestic man I have seen since I first saw the shop-walkers at Maple's—the kind of man whom one supposes that the animals observe, and so learn to temper their contempt for us. This man had the strange whim to call the devil a gentleman, a poor distinction which I could not understand until he showed me a passage, that should be highly interesting to gentlemen and the residue of mankind, in one of the Iolo MSS. Beginning at the beginning, the MS. declares that Adam's eldest son was ungenteel, "a low vassal"; but Seth and Abel were genteel. The angels also, the tenth grade, who fell from heaven, were ungenteel, "through pride, which is the principal characteristic of weakness." Continuing, the writer says of Noah's sons that one was a lord, the second a gentleman, the third a servile clown. Either the usual order of the sons is changed, or Ham was held to be a gentleman because from him was descended Nimrod, and all destroyers are gentlemen. If this be true, then Japheth was a "servile clown,"—in spite of the fact that he was "the first who made a targe with a lake in it, to signify that he and his brothers possessed the whole world," inventing heraldry,—merely in order that ungentility might have a common fount. And thus we see that descent is efficacious to all except descendants of Japheth (or Ham), and that therefore the genealogies are waste paper, and a popular pursuit which has hitherto been regarded as harmless is proved to be also fraudulent.... Then he went back to his books, which he allowed me to see. They were pretty, uncut editions of the profane classics; theology, Welsh history, and Grimm's Fairy Tales—all thumbed and pencilled. Frowning above was a photograph of Spurgeon, and a picture of Whitman from a chance number of an English weekly.