It was no more than ten o’clock in the morning, and yet when we emerged from the shop, a “Rehoboth” was sending a stentorian hymn forth through the town, and the streets were full of people hurrying to it. The tune was wild and stately, and the minor phrases followed each other unfaltering. We insensibly drew towards the door, and listened while the slow melody rose and dropped like a path in the mountains—a path washed with mountain rain and purified with mountain wind. Within, the people stood close in the hideous pews, in the naked galleries; three men in black coats, stationed in three rostrums high up against the white wall, led the singing, and evidently found the weather too hot. We observed that their eyes were upon us, and that an elder seemed to be developing a tendency to offer us a Welsh hymnal, and we retired.
The morning was obviously one to sacrifice to expeditions, and any tourist worthy of the name would no doubt have been by noon on the top of Cader Idris or the Torrent Walk. The landlady of the “Angel,” looking more than ever like Miss O’Flannigan’s aunt, urged us to these and other courses with veiled reproach, as she would have reminded the impenitent of evening service, but the hills in whose lap Dolgelly lies remain unexplored by us. Others have been more conscientious; to them be the glories of accomplishment and the fell privileges of description. The one and only thing that Miss O’Flannigan desired to see was a Welsh woman in a Welsh hat; but this, the landlady was forced to admit, was the one and only thing not procurable in Dolgelly. There was the sextoness of the church, an octogenarian, who had preserved her mother’s hat—perhaps she would do. In half an hour Miss O’Flannigan was driving the octogenarian before her, carrying a band-box as old and yellow as herself; and the rest of the morning was spent in the seclusion of the hotel garden, where, seated on an upturned bucket, the octogenarian balanced the heirloom upon her spotted cap, while Miss O’Flannigan produced studies of her that were more forcible than polite.
I, no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable, and laid down the law to the landlord, the ostler, and the saddler about “chambering” the stuffing of one of the saddles so as to fit certain swellings which had appeared on Tom’s back, which might be the result of warbles, or of an ill-fitting saddle, or of the sudden
The sextoness of Dolgelly.
rise to the dignity of oats, but were certainly capable of unpleasant developments. Tommy’s hard, yellow hide remained unaltered by saddle, oats, curry-comb, or any other of its new conditions. Looks were not his strong point, but we already relied on him—and there was something attractive in the conscientious way in which he shied at gate-posts, cows in the field, and other startling and irregular objects.
It was already far in the afternoon when we rode out over the bridge at Dolgelly, where a single trickle of water crept through the central arch. The sky had mackerel backs in it, the trees stirred delicately to a newly awakened breeze, and the barometer was still falling. The puggarees were packed up, and the pink parasol was furled, but they were doing their appointed work, and the change came slowly nearer. In the meantime we went on and up through wooded glens, past the ideally placed little fishing hotel of Thynn-y-Groes, in clear, genial sunshine, without a horse-fly; and gradually the vague headache, réchauffé from the well-cooked one of yesterday, melted away in that perfect ride. The road was lonely, more lonely than a by-road in West Galway, and, as in Galway, low hazels grew thickly behind the stone walls; the wide lowlands down on our left lay sweet and placid, and silent except for the corncrake; the mountains ran like a blue wall along the west, a wall hacked and gashed as if by a siege, but still indomitable. Cader Idris blocked the end of the valley, overlooking all things; but of what avail are names, to what purpose the narrow English language? They will not give one breath of the transcendent air, or the greenness of the leaves that the goats were tearing from the hazel twigs, or one moment out of the heavenly silence.
Descending leisurely from the heights and their crisp, ragged woods, we discovered a line of railway, and farther on a desolate hillside village, called by its inhabitants “Trowsefunneth.” How they spell it is a different affair; probably they do not try. We had tea there. The proprietor of the inn wished us to have a leg of mutton—“quite tender, yess indeed! been in the ’ouse a week”—but we thought this would be high tea with a vengeance, and accepted the inevitable in its usual form of “’am-an’-ecks.” We can no longer refrain from mentioning that there are two things in Wales, yea, three, which the traveller would do well to avoid, and yet can hardly hope to escape from—butter, bacon, coffee,—all are bad, even odious; the bacon salt, tough, stringy; the butter yellow, coarse, and, if possible, more salt than the bacon; the coffee a shade worse than the ordinary drug supplied by the British hotel-keeper—and what has already been referred to as the narrow English language holds no epithet that will fitly stigmatise British hotel coffee.