A sermon on mountains and country labourers. Twm retaliates upon Dio the devil, with whom he returns in triumph to Llandovery. The lady of Ystrad Feen, and Twm’s gallant service in her behalf.
As they advanced on their journey, which was amongst a most mountainous country, Twm expressed his wonder at seeing the turf-cutters and haymakers following their avocations almost side by side in this wild district. “Well,” cried he, “I know that much has been said, sung and written, in praise of mountain scenery; and where ’tis truly romantic as well as wild, I am a great lover of it myself; but this is not to my liking—it is too dead in its deserted appearance for me. Here no sound salutes the ear but the lonely cry of a few melancholy kites, hungry enough to prey upon one another; and no object strikes the eye but the flat, tame desert, and a few wretched cottages thinly scattered over this desolate region, whose inhabitants are miserably employed in scooping peat from the marsh for their fires, or cutting their bald thin crop of hay from the unenclosed mountain—the gwair rhos cwtta, or moor hay, which dispensing with the incumbrance of a cart or sledge, the women carry home in their aprons, as the winter maintenance of a half-starved cow. To me, there is nothing that associates more with squalid poverty than turf fires: the crackling faggot and the Christmas log, have their rustic characteristics; coal has its proud and solid warmth; the clay-and-culm fires of Cardigan and Pembrokeshire, formed of balls, and fantastically arranged by the industrious hands of fair maidens, are bright and durable, revealing the gay faces of the cheerful semi-circular group—and above all, the smokeless cleanly stone coal; but turf, smoky, ill-savoured, ash-creating, dusty turf—recalls the marsh and moor, rain-loaded skies, and fern-thatched cottages, whose battered roofs swept by the blast, discover the rotten rafters grinning like the bare ribs of poverty; worse than all, the joyless faces of the toil-bowed children of the desert. The old stanza is quite to my mind when it says—
“How gay seems the valley with rich waving wheat,
Fair hands and fair houses, with shelters so neat;
While the whole feather’d choir to delight us conspires,
There’s nought on the mountain but turf and turf fires.”
“And besides that,” added Twm, “I can give you a few rhyming lines of my own, bearing in the same direction. Here they are,
Three things—to my mind each with loveliness teems;
A vale between mountains that’s threaded by streams;
A neat white-wall’d cottage, ’mid gardens and trees;
And a young married pair that appreciate these.”
“Well,” replied Rhys, “do not let us find too much fault with these scenes, for the recollection of what our mountain land has been, would induce me to kiss the sod of its dullest region, when I remember how it became the refuge of our war-worsted fore-fathers in the days of old, as the star of liberty seemed to vanish for ever from our sphere.” The curate grew warm with his subject, and his eyes kindled with enthusiasm as he proceeded. “I could as soon twit my beloved mother with the furrows which Time has ploughed on her honoured brows, as censure the homeliest part of our dear mountains, hallowed of old by the tread of freemen, when the despot foreigner usurped the valleys.
“Freedom, amid a cloudy clime,
Erects her mountain throne sublime,
While natives of the vales and plains
Are gall’d with yokes and slavish chains—
Then shrink we ne’er, unnerved as bann’d
In the cloudy clime of the Mountain Land.Turban’d in her folds of mist
Our Mountain Land the sky has kiss’d,
While on her brow the native wreath
Of yellow furze and purple heath
The rural reign her vales command,
And the freeman’s sword of the Mountain Land.”
Twm accepted the remarks of Rhys as rebukes, for his own depreciatory observations on his native country, and was about to clear himself from all suspicion of lack of nationality; when the latter, looking up at the sun, declared the day so far advanced that he must instantly mount his horse and ride with speed, so as to meet the vicar of Llandovery at the place appointed; on which, directing Twm on the route he was to take, he rode off and left him to pursue his way at leisure.
Thus left alone, Twm prepared for a lengthened walk, and pursued his way in thoughtful silence for many miles, but was at length brought to a stand by the discovery that the way he trod had ceased to be either a road or beaten path; and that he was actually pacing the trackless mountain, with the disagreeable conviction that he had gone wrong, without a clue to recover the right way.
Taking a careful and critical view of the surrounding country, he came to the conclusion that there must be a road through bwlch, or gap, which he perceived dividing the mountains at some distance. He entered it, and hastened on with the utmost alacrity, till he came to a cottage on the road side, opposite to which was an immense rick of turf, that at a distance looked like a long black barn. He called at the cottage, and asked if he was right in his route to Llandovery, “Right!” squeaked a thin old man who met him at the door, “God bless you young man, you could not be more wrong, as your back is to Llandovery, and you are making straight for Trecastle.”