One day, many years after all these things had been so happily and comfortably settled, to the satisfaction of the principal parties concerned, an old friend called upon Twm in the person of Doctor John David Rhys, who had acquired great fame and honour in far-off Continental cities. Their meeting was most joyous; and when he reminded his old pupil of his prophecy respecting his union with the lady of his dream, a friendly pressure of her hand accompanied by an inexpressibly sweet smile, acknowledged her pleasure in the truth of his foresight.
Poetical justice and fact, are unhappily at variance in our closing notice of this most excellent character. During his residence abroad, he changed his profession of a Protestant Divine, and became a Catholic, and a physician; practising among princes and nobles, he soon realized an ample fortune. For the enjoyment of a further intercourse with these, his friends, in preference to his own native Anglesea, he fixed his residence at Llanllwch, in the neighbourhood of Brecon.
Here our hero’s friendship stood him much in stead; for when the enlightened Protestant mobs of the time persecuted him for his faith, forcibly entering his house to search for the Pope in the cavity of his porridge pot, and a legion of Friars in his night-chair and warming-pan, Squire Jones was the magistrate that stood forward to check their lawlessness. His great popularity and known Protestant principles were all sufficient warrants for his word, when he assured the many-headed monster of the groundlessness of such suspicions.
Our hero, who, the reader must be aware, has shown no little power in poesy, set to work to write the history of the Gwydir family, when he discovered that his father was devoting himself to the same purpose. The old man candidly declared that among his ten sons, not one of them possessed a literary taste, or evinced a congenial feeling with him in his pursuits. But his left-handed eleventh seemed to justify the adage respecting luck in odd numbers, which drew on him his affections accordingly.
Squire Jones never forgot the humble way in which he spent the earliest portion of his life; his was a nature as little likely to be unduly elevated by prosperity as unnecessarily cast down by adversity.
When he built a mansion at Tregaron, beside the cottages of his childhood, he would never suffer the homely fabric to be removed, but kept it as a private appendage to his house; the interior containing all its rude characteristics, as left at his mother’s death, which took place a week before his union; although poor Catty survived both her sister Juggy and her husband. There, once a year he made a lonely visit of many hours; and felt his heart soften as he surveyed the rude shelves and wooden bowls and piggins; platters and trenchers; and even the spoons and ladles manufactured by the coarse hand of his late step-father. The unflattering reminiscences awakened by the annual visits were better than sackcloth to the skin of kings, as an antidote to worldly pride, and a check to the overweening heartiness and want of sympathy with our humbler brethren in their struggles for a little firmer feeling on the earth; which is ever the result of the undisputed despotism of prosperity.
Thomas Jones, Esq., filled many most honourable offices in the good town of Brecon, and in such a manner as to prove that fortune for this once had not showed her favours upon one unworthy of them. His early friend, Dr. John David Rhys, mentions him with respect as an accomplished antiquary, and testifies to the general excellence and worth of his character. For many years he was Mayor and Sheriff of Brecon, and we will close our chronicle of his various achievements by one more anecdote.
“Bless me!” cried the lady mayoress one day to her husband, as they passed arm in arm through the street from church, “the people are always laughing to think of my marrying you.” “I don’t wonder,” replied the hero of these adventures, “for whenever I think of it, I laugh myself.”
APPENDIX.
The Triads referred to, as the collection made by Thomas Jones, of Tregaron, (Twm Shon Catty,) are translated from a series in the second volume of the Welsh Archæology, p. 57. The series bear the following title. “These are Triads of the Island of Britain—that is to say, Triads of memorial and record, and the information of remarkable men or things which have been in the Island of Britain; and of the events which befell the Race of the Cymry, from the age of ages.”