When I left on the next morning early, the farmer was threshing with an oaken flail in his barn; but he stepped out to tell me what he knew of the way through the bogs and over the hills,—for there was no road or path,—and to beg me not to go, and to ask me to pay what I had paid at my former inn, for my lodging.
VIEW NEAR MUMBLES, SWANSEA
The next twenty miles were the simplest and most pleasant in the world. For nearly the whole way there was a farm in every two miles. I had to call at each to ask my way. At one, the farmer asked me in and sat me by his peat fire to get dry, and gave me good milk and butter and bread, and a sack for my shoulders, and a sense of perfect peace which was only disturbed when he found that I could not help him in the verses he was writing for a coming wedding. At another, the farmer wrote out a full list of the farms and landmarks on my way, lest I should forget, and gave me bread and butter and milk. At another, I had but to sit and get dry and watch an immeasurably ancient, still, and stately woman, her face bound with black silk which came under her chin like a stock, and moving only to give a smile of welcome and goodwill. At another, they added cheese to the usual meal, and made the peat one golden cone upon the hearth, and brewed a pale drink which is called tea. Sometimes the shrill-voiced women, with no English, their hair flying in the wind, came out and shrieked and waved directions. In one of the houses I was privileged to go from the kitchen, with its dresser and innumerable jugs and four tea-services, to the drawing-room. It was a change that is probably more emphasised in Wales than elsewhere, since the kitchens are pleasanter, the drawing-rooms more mysterious, than in England, I think. The room was cold, setting aside the temperature, and in spite of crimson in the upholstery and cowslip yellow in the wall-paper and dreary green on the floor. There was a stuffed heron; a large pathetic photograph of man and wife; framed verses; some antimacassars, and some Bibles.... The room was dedicated to the unknown God. The farmer did not understand it; he admired it completely, and with awe, reverencing it as a priest his god, knowing that it never did him any good, and yet not knowing what evil might come if he were without it.
At last, as I left landmarks behind in the rain, I reached a poor little house where a family of sixteen sat round the peat or went about their work, all preserving that easy dignity when their poverty is under the eyes of a stranger which I have ever found among the Welsh. Of his own accord, the farmer came with me over the worst part of my way—two apparently trackless miles—until I came to a road at last. He spoke no English; and yet I had, and think he had, a wonderful sense of satisfaction in our companionship of an hour, as he led me over undulating, boggy lands intersected by rivers,—which looked a little way off like an unpeopled continent in miniature, with lake and hill and stream,—and along the edges of steep crags that rose sheer from black brooks and grey foam, and above hollows inhabited by perfect, golden birches. It was a land which always comes back to me when the same cold rain, on the top of a London omnibus, beats the face and blurs the hurrying crowd and makes the ears tingle. Once, the rain stopped, and the air was calm, as we passed among decaying oaks, which were as a church full of men when the organ begins, and we no better than any one of them.... He accepted money with as little offence as the others had given when they refused it. As a rule, I would rather drop a sovereign by the road than offer a man sixpence who has nothing of the lackey about him, though imitativeness has compelled me to do otherwise.
PENNARD CASTLE, GLAMORGANSHIRE
As he left me, a mist which he had probably foreseen suddenly cloaked me and hid everything except the road and its green edges, where the gentlest of winds shook the rain on the feathered grasses, but could not make it fall. The road was a river, shallow but swift, and for four miles there was not a house visible, except when the mist divided for a minute and showed, far away, a fair, shining, unshadowed valley, and a white house and motionless sheep, which I saw as a departed spirit might for a moment behold the earth; for the world was gone like last year's clouds. Yet again, the mist rose a little and showed lawns with a lovely dim light over the grass, as if the lawns had a light of their own which also made them seem aloof. And strangely sufficient was the mist, the hard road, and the moist stick in my hand, when my mood changed as when at night bells clash as if they were building the cathedral again with their noise, and we watch its pinnacles thus made among the stars, and joyously they clash so that we believe they will never cease; and suddenly they cease and slowly toll. For the inn glimmered close by, and I heard the rustle of many sheep, and my brain began to prepare itself for meeting men again.
December
Twenty miles from the sea, a little river leaves an underground lake, flows through a cave, and falls radiant from the darkness among steep rocks, and takes a course like a man's thoughts when they have the joy of an unknown impulse and no certain aim. There, the river always talks of Spring. It winds and studies all the country round,—castle and farm and inn and old graves,—with many sharp digressions, which I suppose it could not have done without, any more than I in a similar case. Now it shines and curves gently and looks over its bank at the cattle, and now, changing its voice, it is gloomy and intent among mossy stones, and now it leaps and is all foam over a ladder of crag. Suddenly it enters a steep, wooded valley, and falling over a perpendicular cliff, it is richly embowered, and always remembers Summer, and begins to please the trout where it swirls with shuddering foam or runs swiftly in the middle, and gloomily and slow under the alder roots. But in the wood, where birch and oak and hornbeam stand over it, it gains a look of great and growing age which mountain rivers have, and a shadow besets its cheerfulness, so unlike the happy prime of English waters among cowslip meadows. When it leaves the wood it is a masterly, full-grown stream that can turn a mill-wheel. Then it begins to pause in deep pools under shadowy bridges, where the otter slides for a moment over a slippery ledge and then can hide his path for fifty yards. There the girls stand and dip their vessels, and think for a minute while the vessels fill, and raise them again, spilling some, and show that the black water can shine as when it left the mountain ten miles away.