It is difficult in these days of chemistry, steam, and mechanical contrivances for reducing labour—if not for dispensing with it altogether—to realise the difficulties attending the farmer in wild mountainous districts, far removed from the centres of civilisation, and unacquainted with the agricultural implements and appliances even then in use in more favoured districts. Places where there were no carts and no proper roads, and where the ascents and descents were too abrupt for anything but a biped or a mule; where every acre of the cultivated mountain or moorland had to be turned over with the spade, and every particle of manure laid on the land had to be carried thither in baskets strapped on human shoulders, or in panniers borne by ass or mule.
Yet, such were the difficulties Mrs. Edwards and other Welsh farmers had to contend with even up to the present century, the moorland farmers of Cumberland and the North-West Riding of Yorkshire being somewhat similarly situated.
The loss of a whole week's labour at the beginning of October was a serious detriment. Even Rhys knew that, and finding that he was to take his instructions from his mother and not from Evan, he smothered his ill-humour and buckled to in earnest, though his brows contracted when a new form of labour was suggested to him.
'Rhys, do you think you could cut down the bracken at the edge of the wood?' asked his mother dubiously.
'Yes, surely, I can cut it. Did I not help to reap the oats? But why should it be cut?'
'Evan says it will save straw in the farmyard, and should be stacked for bedding for the pigs and cattle before it do be too late. And after it has served the beasts, it will be better for some of the land than lime.'
''Deed, an' Evan do seem mighty clever! Houses and bedding for pigs indeed!'
'Yes, indeed, Rhys, and I am not too proud or too old to learn from him. Please God, he will be helping us to keep the farm in spite of Mr. Pryse.'
Not another word of scorn fell from the boy's lips.
Bidding Lewis, the shepherd's son, follow with Breint, the pony, to carry home the fern, as instructed by his mother, he, with a sickle over his arm, took his way across a grassy slope towards the steep woodland, stepping alongside the musical runnel the gushing hill-side spring sent, as overflow from a huge stone trough or basin, across the land and down the incline to join the tumbling brook from which the farm derived its name. The tawny brook itself had its source high up in the peaty moss on the mountain-top, and had worn, or found, a channel in a narrow cleft between precipitous rocks, whose seamy sides barely afforded foothold for fir and larch. Yet widening and deepening into a picturesque glen, the ash and the elder hung out their red or purple-black berries over the noisy and tumbling watercourse, and the sturdy trunks of oak and beech uprose and spread out leafy arms to shade it from the too intrusive westering sun, dropping in a ripe acorn or a triangular nut quietly now and then, to float away and fructify in a future season far from the parent tree.