The woman, however, begged him to eat some bread and butter where he was, and cutting a plateful, placed it before him, having first offered me some, which I declined.
“But you have nothing to drink with it,” said I to him.
“If you please,” said the woman, “I will go for a pint of ale to the public-house at the Pandy; there is better ale there than at the inn at Llansanfraid. When my husband goes to Llansanfraid he goes less for the ale than for the conversation, because there is little English spoken at the Pandy, however good the ale.”
John Jones said he wanted no ale—and attacking the bread and butter speedily made an end of it; by the time he had done the storm was over, and getting up I gave the child twopence, and left the cottage with Jones. We proceeded some way farther up the valley, till we came to a place where the ground descended a little. Here Jones, touching me on the shoulder, pointed across the stream. Following with my eye the direction of his finger, I saw two or three small sheds with a number of small reddish blocks, in regular piles beneath them. Several trees felled from the side of the torrent were lying near, some of them stripped of their arms and bark. A small tree formed a bridge across the brook to the sheds.
“It is there,” said John Jones, “that the husband of the woman with whom we have been speaking works, felling trees from the alder swamp and cutting them up into blocks. I see there is no work going on at present or we would go over—the woman told me that her husband was at Llangollen.”
“What a strange place to come to work at,” said I, “out of crowded England. Here is nothing to be heard but the murmuring of waters and the rushing of wind down the gulleys. If the man’s head is not full of poetical fancies, which I suppose it is not, as in that case he would be unfit for any useful employment, I don’t wonder at his occasionally going to the public-house.”
After going a little farther up the glen and observing nothing more remarkable than we had seen already, we turned back. Being overtaken by another violent shower just as we reached the Pandy I thought that we could do no better than shelter ourselves within the public-house, and taste the ale, which the wife of the clog-maker had praised. We entered the little hostelry which was one of two or three shabby-looking houses, standing in contact, close by the Ceiriog. In a kind of little back room, lighted by a good fire and a window, which looked up the Ceiriog valley, we found the landlady, a gentlewoman with a wooden leg, who on perceiving me got up from a chair, and made me the best curtsey that I ever saw made by a female with such a substitute for a leg of flesh and bone. There were three men, sitting with jugs of ale near them on a table by the fire, two were seated on a bench by the wall, and the other on a settle with a high back, which ran from the wall just by the door, and shielded those by the fire from the draughts of the doorway. He of the settle no sooner beheld me than he sprang up and placing a chair for me by the fire bade me in English be seated, and then resumed his own seat. John Jones soon finding a chair came and sat down by me, when I forthwith called for a quart of cwrw da. The landlady bustled about on her wooden leg and presently brought us the ale with two glasses, which I filled, and taking one, drank to the health of the company, who returned us thanks, the man of the settle in English rather broken. Presently one of his companions, getting up, paid his reckoning and departed, the other remained, a stout young fellow dressed something like a stone-mason, which indeed I soon discovered that he was—he was far advanced towards a state of intoxication and talked very incoherently about the war, saying that he hoped it would soon terminate for that if it continued he was afraid he might stand a chance of being shot, as he was a private in the Denbighshire Militia. I told him that it was the duty of every gentleman in the militia, to be willing at all times to lay down his life in the service of the Queen. The answer which he made I could not exactly understand, his utterance being very indistinct, and broken; it was, however, made with some degree of violence, with two or three Myn Diawls, and a blow on the table with his clenched fist. He then asked me whether I thought the militia would be again called out. “Nothing more probable,” said I.
“And where would they be sent to?”
“Perhaps to Ireland,” was my answer, whereupon he started up with another Myn Diawl, expressing the greatest dread of being sent to Iwerddon.
“You ought to rejoice in your chance of going there,” said I, “Iwerddon is a beautiful country, and abounds with whiskey.”