Welsh Journals

I SPENT much of my time in holidays out on the hillside, as far from the Inn as possible, in case Susie should call me to help with the daily tasks that befitted a small girl of my position. It was ever a delight to smell the bracken and look down from the breast of the mountain to the valley below, at Castell Coch peeping out from a haze of green. One day in August, I was interested in calculating the quickest way in which to reach the village of Tongwynlais that night with one or two other companions. My grandmother objected to our going. She said we should "see something" on our way home. Sammy, Ifan Glamore's boy, said that "something" meant "Ladi Wen." Below me ran a pathway down into the woods. There it lost itself, but lower down a white ribbon of road ran parallel with the mountain road. It was no good going to the fair until the moon rose, my companions told me. By eight o'clock it was riding across the valley and we were run- ning through the gray-green woods looking neither to right nor to left. There was Sammy, Ifan Gllamore's son, vowing that we should see the White Lady coming home that night. We had run past old Mari's house in case her eerie face should be peeping over the hedge. I never liked her and never believed her when she said that she had once been with the fairies for a year and a day. She certainly had been missing from the hillside, but it is my experience that teaches me how to view these tales that were cast about her. We must have run most of the way down the road past a few cottages near some tinworks, then on to the village of Tongwynlais. It is diffi- cult to explain how these different villages viewed each other, though so few miles apart. They might have been different worlds. Sometimes an inspiring youth decided to seek a wife outside his village and he would come seeking her on the fine moonlight nights. When we reached the field where the fair was held we paid our pennies and stood bewildered at all the noise and glare. It was almost like the picture of some German scene with the castle on the heights, the moonlit river flowing down, and near its banks this mad scene of reckless gaiety. Gingerbread, brandv-snaps, rice pudding and other dainties lay before us. Mysterious-looking booths with swarthy men shouting their enter- tainments at us, girls screaming, men shouting round the shooting ranges and cocoanut stalls, then fat girls dressed up in showy colours danc- ing on the vacant spaces. It was a weird picture, and we, being very, very young, felt half fright- ened, and almost wished we had not come, but Sammy, the bravest soul among us took my arm and made me dance with him. FFAIR TON by Mrs. Elwyn James. By ten o'clock we felt it was late enough to start on our romantic path home and I can always see the flare of torches which made the road out- side the fair ground seem darker till we had run along and crossed to our side of the valley. It was only when we got into our woods and tried to climb quickly that we felt the burden of our sins. Sammy swore that "Ladi Wen" sat on one of the trees, but I have often looked at that tree since and wondered if it was a beautiful white owl he saw there. Certainly its "cydyoo, cydyoo" sounded ghostly through the silent woods. When I reached the Inn, nobody was there- the door was open on the latch and a beautiful fire burned on the hearth but there was no light in the lamp. I thought my grandmother had just been called out to someone who was ill and dying, for she it was who laid out all the dead on that hill- side. She used to say that she knew when a death would occur because she always heard the drawers of the linen-chest being drawn out the night before. I remembered her saying this the previous night in her old fourposter bed. There was nothing to do but wait, so I sat down in my usual corner. Suddenly a stranger stood beside me in the gathering darkness. Great gusts of wind blew up from the valley and down the wide chimney, and so thin and gaunt was the stranger, that I envisioned him being whirled up the chim- ney and out into the windy air to mingle with the spirits of the mountain top. But he said not a word He only looked at me from deep, sunken eyes, where burnt a flame as fierce as the wind. Old Father Time must have forgotten him on earth. His clothes smelt of must and made me think of the old curio shop in Crockherbstown, where the relics of centuries lay mouldering in the dust and grime of age. His eves wandered to the old-fashioned oil lamp on the deal table and back again to something he carried on his side. It was an old iron lantern with a conical top, an iron handle and tiny diamond panes of thick knobly glass. Inside, there was still a gleam of thin, yellow lieht. This fascinated me and I looked long at it. Nobody waited to be asked to sit down in the Mountain Inn. But the stranger was still stand- ing, getting gaunter and gaunter, I thought. Perhaps it was the gathering gloom and the wind- drawn fire that added to his size. "There I crouch, when owls do fly, On the bat's back I do fly I gabbled to myself as I learnt a poem for home-