CHAPTER XIII.
Moses displays his inventive power in catching mutton. The storm bursts, and the tricks of Twm and Moses are discovered. Hukin Heer informs, and receives his reward. The house is in an uproar.
As the material of their feasting was waning, like a pleasant moon that declines towards the latter quarter, Moses grew more and more uneasy, as foul food or starvation was staring him in the face, night and day. As he utterly failed to sleep, he employed the silent hours of midnight to hatch a scheme for the procurement of future provender. “Twm,” quoth the young schemer one morning, “you love mutton, and so do I; and as you provided the pancakes and the pigs, as well as the fish, (a quinsey fill the throats that swallowed them!) it is now my turn to be founder of the feast. I will not only find the feast, but I will manage matters so well, that Sheeny Greeg herself shall cook it for us.”
Then he related, as Morris had informed him, how in former years the sheep had repeatedly fallen headlong from the height of Allty Craig, and been killed, and how since those times he had made a thick hedge to keep them from the edge of the precipice. “But we won’t be so particular now,” said Moses, “for I mean to get up an accident for one of the sheep. Then we may eat and be happy again; we’ll have a change this time. It was pork before, and now we’ll have mutton.”
“With all my heart,” said Twm, “only do it all yourself, then we shall see what you can do without my assistance.” Thus challenged, Moses felt it as a point of humour to proceed in the affair alone.
Explanatory of what follows, it is here necessary to quote the observation of one of our best South Wales tourists, on the subject of the Welsh hilly sheep. “I was much struck,” says Malkin, “with the difference between the hilly sheep and those of the vale; the former are not only smaller, but infinitely more elegant and picturesque in figure. They seemed to have all their wits about them, so that one would think the race had acquired its proverbial character for silliness by feeding on rich and artificial pastures, without having inherited it originally in the state of nature. When we got into the lane, we met with a flock of several hundred, which live among the rocks all the year round, only coming down in shearing time. They had us in front, and their shepherd and his dog in the rear. The bounds many of them made in avoiding us, were equally powerful and lofty with those of wild goats.”
Even such was the woolly tribe, from which the insatiate Jew was now preparing to select a victim. Ambitious of the sole credit of the enterprise, he desired Twm to stay below and leave him to follow his own plan. Scarcely thinking of the matter in hand, Twm took his seat on a gate, opposite to the lofty cliff of Allty Craig Llwyd, pondering in his mind about his distant home, the loved scenes which he had left for these, and above all, his mother, from whom he had been so long separated. Moses wound up the hill, and attained the top at the back of the cliff.
With the assistance of the farm-dog he soon drove one of the finest of the wethers into the angular nook formed by the hedge of the adjoining wood, and that which screened from the edge of the terrific cliff. The dog, being set on, barked and bit incessantly, while Moses shouted and bellowed with waving arms, till, worried by stupidity at last, the sheep bounded up, and sprang far over the hedge, and downward in the yielding air—ignorant of the yawning gulf behind the hedge, and the snare laid for his life! Moses set up a triumphant yell like that of a wild Indian, as he peered over the precipice and saw the downward movements of the poor sheep. Startled with the shout of Moses, at this moment Twm looked up, and saw the animal describing a rainbow sweep, and turning over and over in its descent through the air, and its ultimate fall into the quarry beneath, where it dropped lifeless.
So little did our hero relish this cruel affair that he would scarcely speak to Moses, when the latter expected high applause for his handywork. But the Jew-boy, nothing daunted, ran to the farmer, whom he found cobbling up an old plough in the yard, to save expense of paying a wheelwright.
“Oh dear! Oh dear!” whined Moses, with the greatest appearance of heart-touched concern, “a terrible accident has happened—one of the sheep—the fattest and finest of the whole flock—has just sprung over the hedge above Allty Craig, and broke its beautiful neck.” Morris threw down the axe he was using, and looked nearly as sorry, angry, and despondent as he felt. “Nothing but misfortunes!” cried he at last, “nothing but misfortunes for me, wretched man that I am!” his thoughts dwelling at that moment on the fine pig that he lately lost. “First a fine pig, and now my finest sheep. Verily, this must be the end of the world, such judgments could not come without reason!”