Welsh Journals

Our First Serial. Two Chapters from a New Novel MICHAEL EDWARDS THE NATIONALIST AT COLLEGE By EMYR HUMPHREYS. (Author of "The Little Kingdom.") CHAPTER I. THE moon, being pertinent to such events, slowly swam from behind a cloud like a golden swan emerging on the broad lilac lake. Michael, seated on the castle wall, a little apart from the others, saw the long flat plain below, and the distant mountains and the sea, all refined and romanticised and pooled to a picture in the pale moonlight. The others were singing, softly it seemed, their voices blended in the calm element of the summer night air. Between his fingers he squeezed a solid lump of mortar lifted from the wall, poured there between the stones, he thought, by Welsh or Norman or Gascon or Saxon-or by what hand ? A broad rough hand ingrained with dirt, hardened, dirtied, broadened with handling and breaking and trimming of stone. Such hands put up this castle. Although the castle was still imposingly strong, growing like a symmetrical extension out of the rock, like a statue on a rough-hewn pedestal, yet it seemed comically lilliputian and inoffensive, so near to the gaunt permanency and might of the mountains. Historical geography, he thought, insists that mountains have bigger parts to play in destiny than castles, and he smiled as he looked at his singing companions, young Welsh men and women, all nationalists, singing on the walls of this castle last built by an English King for the expressed purpose of quieting the Welsh." What had the lecturer said that morning 10,000 horsemen rode across that plain, and for two years laid siege to this castle. And when at last the thin emaciated Welsh commander handed over his sword to the well-fed victor, he did so saying that now English, the castle was henceforward fit only for sanitary purposes." Michael turned this story over in his mind with much pleasure. Such fore-fathers knew the meaning of glory. In spite of the centuried fight against a powerful opulent relentless enemy, in spite of famine,