"Peth a elwir 'adwydd' yn Saesneg, Dafydd?" he asked.
Dafydd Dafis looked as if he had never sung in his life.
"Post—hedgestake," he replied.
Slowly they got out their dinner.
As they did so Howell Gruffydd came up from the beach. Formerly, he had rebuked Eesaac Oliver for speaking Welsh in the presence of those who did not understand it; now, John Willie Garden's presence was entirely disregarded. He did not understand six words of the low, rapid conversation.
Then in the middle of it a light sound came over the sandhills, and the talk suddenly ceased. They waited. The sound came again.
Hedgestakes were being flung from the cart down by the side of the road.
The workmen continued to sit after dinner, but not a ladder was mounted again that day.
John Pritchard was big and sickly and consumptive, and his farm kitchen was also the Llanyglo Post Office. There John Willie went at six o'clock that evening to post a letter for his mother. Nominally, John's mother, ancient Mrs. Pritchard, whom Dafydd Dafis so greatly loved, was the postmistress, but actually Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress, did most of the work. She was sealing the letter-bag from a saucer of melted wax when John Willie entered. The postman's cart waited at the door, and beyond it, past the gate, could be seen the hedgestakes that had been shot down on the opposite side of the road. The postman was explaining something to John Pritchard, and Dafydd Dafis and his labourers listened in silence. In her chair by the fire sat ancient Mrs. Pritchard, seeming old as the Dinas itself, her face a skull with a membrane stretched over it, a black gophered snood surrounding it, her hands anatomies, and her mouth from time to time making a sort of weak baa-ing.
Of the hushed and rapid conversation at the door, John Willie caught this time a phrase or two he understood. "Wait and see, whatever," he heard them say; "let them drive them in ... adwydd ... perhaps it be on Thursday ... Saesneg...." He approached the group.