"There was sixteen horses there——"
"And the Squire, he hunt——"
"It all go to that Abercelyn in the mines—thousands of pounds!—--"
"There is land here to build stables if Mr. Garden wiss——"
"Indeed, Hugh Roberts, if he build any more we be bigger than Porth Neigr, whatever!—--"
And this hyperbole always raised a laugh. Porth Neigr, besides being the head of the railway, had a market place, two banks, a stone quay, a court house, and an English Church.
The house rose higher and higher, and by the time John Willie Garden came again, in July, it had reached the first floor. Long rows of roof slates were stacked under a temporary shed, and, as if he had not had lessons enough in the school by the Baptist Chapel, Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd did multiplication sums and Welsh-English exercises upon them. John Willie's eyes danced when they saw the scaffolding and ladders. He was six rungs up a ladder before you could have turned round. He was up that ladder and down a second and up a third almost as quickly, nor did he take breath until, short of swarming up the scaffold-poles, he had stood on the topmost point of the structure. Then, with the air of something accomplished, he condescended to the level ground again.
Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of the farms and cottages, to the tenants of which they were bound by ties of consanguinity; the others put up at the little alehouse half a mile out on the Porth Neigr road, which served also as a shop for the outlying farms. Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth near the mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. John Willie dined daily with them. Never was such importance as that with which he came nigh to bursting. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the Trwyn, no longer called him; here was not only a house going up, but his house. In his father's absence he could give orders. He became knowing in limes and mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He strutted about with a square, setting it carelessly against angles, and derided Eesaac Oliver and his slates and long-division sums. The eaves-level was reached; they began to get the roof-timbers up; the sandhills resounded with hammering and sawing; and the upper part of the house began to resemble a toast-rack against the sky. Only one stone remained to be set in position. This was the gable-stone with "E. G., 1882" upon it. John Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which he ciphered would soon be required.
As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Already three men, a plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, had been down from Manchester, and fresh supplies of timber—sections of staircase and so on—had come in carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all at once the work came to a sudden stop—how that toast-rack stood against the sky for another year without a slate upon it—and how Edward Garden, away in Manchester, had once more to accept the line of least resistance, while his son loitered disconsolately about the unfinished building until something even more exciting claimed his interest—to tell these things another chapter had better be begun.