Amidst the broad-woodlands that formerly extended around the ancestral mansion, wild beasts of various kinds were supposed to roam at large. In the remotest depths of the forest lurked the dreaded basilisk, a formidable monster whose glance caused instant death to the ill-starred wight upon whom its gaze might rest, but which perished itself if first perceived by a man.
At last a certain bold fellow determined to rid the countryside of this objectionable beast. Causing himself to be shut up in a cask and rolled into the forest, he peeped through the bung-hole, and presently spied the basilisk without himself being seen. Thereupon the dreaded monster, giving vent to an unearthly yell that could be heard for miles around, fell down and perished upon the spot, so that the country-folk were no longer troubled by the molestations of the basilisk. A dragon legend, very similar to the above, is connected with the village of Mordiford in Herefordshire.
By-and-by, as we descend from the uplands, a broad reach of the tideway opens out right before us, where the twin streams of Cleddau merge into the widening Haven. Thus we enter the village of Langwm at its upper end, escorted by a rabble of noisy, unkempt urchins who cumber the narrow roadway.
Here, in the very heart of southern Pembrokeshire, stranded like a human jetsam upon one of the inmost recesses of Milford Haven, we find an isolated community, whose speech and physiognomy alike proclaim their Teutonic origin. Imagination conjures up those far-away times, when the sturdy immigrants from over seas—ancestors of these hardy fisher-folk—pushed their advance up the winding waterway, despite the desperate onslaughts of the Britons, who, fighting for hearth and home, 'rolled on like the billows of a retiring tide with noise, fury, and devastation, but on each retreat yielded ground to the invaders.'
In their own thoroughgoing fashion, the newcomers set to work to construct a chain of castles to guard their hard-won territory; and thus, protected from the restless foe, grew up those peaceful villages and smiling homesteads, surrounded by orchards, fields, and pasture lands, that have earned for this portion of the county its title of the Little England beyond Wales.
But revenons à nos moutons, for it is time to look about us.
A curious place is Langwm, and a singular race are the people that dwell therein. Small 'butt-and-ben' cottages, some thatched, some slated, others roofed with hideous corrugated iron, compose the major portion of the village; which straggles down a narrow combe, whose lower reaches open upon an oozy elbow of the river.
