And in the long winter nights when he and Davy sorted fleeces or combed the wool, or tended the dye-pot on the fire; when Ales taught Jonet to twirl the flaxen thread drawn from the distaff, so as to set the spindle dancing on the floor to the tune of the mother's industrious spinning-wheel, how it tried his patience to see William making figures and calculations on a board, with chalk or ruddle by the light of the candle, whilst the knitting-pins, which should have been earning money, lay idle by his side.

There are men ready to perform generous acts, who are flagrantly unjust, but cannot see it. Robert Jones had urged Rhys Edwards to 'be just.' He should have said 'be generous,' and Rhys might have responded to the appeal. He resented the imputation of injustice.

Yet he denied to his brother the meed of praise his service merited; he begrudged him the time to acquire the common rules of simple arithmetic; perhaps because he felt it was a step to something beyond his own attainment. He counted not the money saved in masonry as money earned. He might have been content had William been as passively submissive as Davy and Jonet, but he found in him a spirit boldly daring to cope with his own, and it stung him to find the boy upheld in his resistance.

So years crept on. The third winter passed, the snows melted, the roads were free for traffic, the river sang a pæan to approaching spring, the pink and brown buds were bursting into green, song birds were flitting and fluttering about the eaves and boughs, all was life and activity upon the farm. The Osprey had never again put into port at Cardiff, where Mr. Pryse bit his nails and snarled more cantankerously than ever, and nothing had been heard of Evan. Ales lost heart, she did not sing with the birds; but William, no longer snubbed, worked on the farm with the best, until another barrier rose between himself and Rhys, in the shape of another stone wall.

Hedges have now superseded walls in many parts of Glamorganshire; but at the date of this narrative, the fields and lanes were universally bounded by what are known as 'dry walls,' and still they serve as fences on the uplands.

By 'dry walls' are to be understood walls built without mortar or cement, of irregular, unhewn flagstones, so put together, so wedged in one with another, as to stand firm where a cemented wall might give way exposed to the high winds of those elevated regions, the very crevices allowing the blasts to pass through, and so reduce the pressure on the mass. Such are the walls in Craven and other parts of northern England.

Yet it is no uncommon thing for the coping-stones to be hurled away in a fierce gale, or for large portions of such walls to be blown down, as came to pass on Brookside Farm that gusty spring.

Here was an opportunity for William to turn his talent to account and save his mother's pocket, as be sure he did.

So far, so good. Rhys made no objection, and Mrs. Edwards was well pleased. Davy had begun to feel proud of his brother.

But it so happened that Robert Jones, whose window had long before been fitted in by William, came to seek his services, not merely to repair a breach, but to enclose a portion of ground as a stone yard.