Welsh Journals

Lloyd fasts every Friday and has crosses about the house, just like the Papists ? I have heard that he has been wanting Mr. Hughes, the parson of Llanaled, to have service in Church every morning, and get the school children to attend. That is the way they are going to begin, you see; they will get at the children and make Puseyites of them in spite of us. and then where shall we be ? Does he really want Parson Hughes to read prayers every morning? Well, I am pretty sure he won't succeed there at any rate. If any parson likes to shirk his duty, Hughes is one. I won't say that it would do the children much good to go to service every morning though I can't see what harm it would do them. It would certainly be better for Mr. Hughes to spend a few more hours a week in Church and something less at the Prince Llewelyn." Yes, yes, it is a pity he is rather fond of ale, but he is a kind man, and a good gwladwr for all that, and he is no persecutor. There is no Puseyism about him." No. there is not, nor much of anything else. I don't wonder at your saying a good word for him. "WEST LAND, BEST LAND" THE out-lying buttresses of the west-land sweep before me from Cardigan Island to St. David's Head, half lost in the purple heat-haze far down to the south. The perfume of the gorse blossoms, burning in the hot sunshine, fills every cuckoo- haunted Pembrokeshire glade with incense, and surges up the steep hill roads in warm waves of heavy scent. Everywhere it is gorse, golden gorse, carpeting the heaths, fringing the edges of the cliffs, gilding the hedgerow tops with ruddy gold; gorse blossom spangling the country-side far and wide until it merges to the west into a realm of azure where sea and sky vie with each other in solid, opaque blueness gorse dotting the ling-clad scarps of the Preselly range to the south and mingling with the heather on the slopes of Frenni Fawr far to the east. Is it any wonder that, living in these very surroundings, the old Romanticists of the Mabinogion should have woven such tales of golden-haired heroines and great warriors pavilioned amid unutterable splendours of cloth of gold ? On this gold-decked earth they dreamed their dreams, and in this beautiful, soft Dyfed dialect they found expression for them. He has emptied his Church and does not interfere with the chapels. But to return to Mr. Lloyd. I am afraid that we shall have occasion to regret the loss of our old landlords. These young land- lords are much given to changes, I hear. They have new notions about draining and improvements, and I am afraid that high rents will be one of these notions too." Yes, I have very little doubt of it. He has paid a high price for all the farms, and you may be sure that the old rents will never satisfy him. It would not be above one per cent, and if the breed of Tom Lloyd is not greatly altered, that interest will never do." Well, God's will be done. I felt it rather hard the year before last with bad harvests and losses, but I felt that I was in God's hands then, and tried to submit. But now I fear worse trials are in store for me. David prayed that he might not fall into the hand of man he chose to fall into God's hands and it is likely we may find out before long what a good choice He made." It is a noble country, this west-land a land of wind rippled cornfields and broad bosomed meadows, of quaint, homely farmhouses and peaceful hedgerows covered with a riot of wild flowers and fringed with hazel and briar and hawthorn and wild- cherry. A land of grand sweeping headlands whose Scandinavian names blaze the sea-trail of the Norse rover of old of quiet nestling coves and sable wave- carved rocks of sand-dunes tinged when the day is fading, with an ineffably lonely tint of yellow-green where sea-rushes and drift-sand meet. Its people a kindly, homely race of farmers, quicker of speech and impulse, less rugged of feature and character than your austere, granitic, northerner amid his iron-bound mountains. These westerners are indeed the Provencals of Wales; they too have had their troubadours in the distant past. For it is a land of old romance for all its homely, rustic mien. Was it not on the highway near Narberth that Pwyll, the knightly huntsman met a lady on a pure white horse of large size with a garment of shining gold around her." There too, he met the