The writer of the Sixpenny Guide to Llanyglo and Neighbourhood, in speaking of the rise of the town, made use of an obvious image which we will take leave to borrow from him. "Thenceforward," he wrote, "Llanyglo sprang up as if by magic out of the soil itself."

Indeed it did something like it. Watching it, you would have thought of one of Philip Lacey's gardens in the short days before Spring had begun to warm the air. Neat, bare, brown, friable soil, with not yet a crocus or a snowdrop to be seen; here and there a stick with a tiny linen tab fluttering (reminding you of Terry Armfield's little "Keep off the Grass" board with "Delyn Avenue" written upon it); frames half open and inverted bells, dibbing-strings, sprinklings of lime, and a few whirligigs to keep the birds away; these, and the promise of the scent and colour to come—it did indeed resemble Llanyglo. Not all at once did the pea-sticks become builders' scaffold-poles, the lines of string the plotting-out of streets. As of Philip's gardens, you could not have said of Llanyglo on any particular day, "This has changed more than it was changing yesterday, more than it will be again changing to-morrow." But for all that, nothing remained any longer the same. Philip's men, working over the blindfold earth with clay and spittle, caused its lids to open; Edward Garden and his associates, similarly, with money for manure, labour to let in the air and light, and the gentle airs of advertisement already fanning an incipient repute, made a garden of stone and iron, with buds of stucco, flowers of paint and glass and gilding, and fruit after its kind to ripen by and by.

Humanity was the soil he worked on, and his knowledge of it the force with which he did so. Its hopes and appetites, its need of noise and change and laughter, its stretching itself after fetters struck off and its resolve to have a better, a much better time than it had ever had before—out of these things came Edward Garden's beds and borders. He would grow flowers of pleasure for those of the towns to pick. And, since you do not advance the glory of July by neglecting to make the most of March, his crops also had their rotation. For this, in a manner of speaking, was Llanyglo's March, and what though it lasted two, three, four years? The Laceys and the Raymond Briggses were to be cultivated while they were yet there. Blooming and falling again, they would make an excellent preparation, and there was plenty to do in the meantime. There were other hotels to build, and a wet-weather pavilion for tea and talk and dancing, and a landing-stage for the twenty new boats, and this and that and the other—and always, always, the coming full summer to look forward to, the summer of ten, eleven, twelve years thence, the summer when, not the Laceys, but the employees of their fourteen or fifteen shops should talk of Llanyglo; the summer when Mr. Morrell should come no more, but his operatives should draw their thousands from the Clubs and rain them upon the town; the summer when all should be changed but the steadfast Trwyn, and all different save the mountains behind, and nothing the same save the still and watching sea.

The Sarn-Porth Neigr Loop was constructed in 1886-7, and opened in the May of the last-named year. One of its earlier trains brought, in a first-class compartment, Philip and Mrs. Lacey and the Misses June and Wygelia, fresh from Paris; and in a third-class compartment it brought a family called Topham. Mr. Topham was head-clerk in a Liverpool Irish-bacon-importing concern, and Philip Lacey, meeting him once or twice at Philharmonic Promenade Concerts, had forgotten the golden rule that it is easier to get into conversation with a man than it is to shake him off again, and had fallen into the habit of nodding to him. In fact, a sort of acquaintanceship had been struck up. He had learned Topham's name, and Topham his. All this had been in Liverpool.

But it was one thing to strike up an acquaintanceship in Liverpool, and quite another to continue that acquaintanceship elsewhere. Philip Lacey, seeing Barry Topham get into the train, had not doubted that the bacon-importer's clerk would be dropping off again after a few stations. But at Stockport, where Philip had descended to stretch his legs, Topham had met him on the platform and had informed him that he was going to Llanyglo.

Now when Philip went away for a few weeks' change he liked that change to be a change. He didn't come to Llanyglo to meet casuals from Liverpool.

He began to wonder whether Llanyglo was quite what it had been.

And so did Mr. Morrell, who brought his daughter Hilda from Brighton that year.

And so did Val Clayton, who also came that year, merely in order to see what sort of vermouth they sold at the other hotels.

For soon there were three hotels, the original "Cambrian," the "Cardigan," and the "Montgomery." All these were on what by and by became the front, and between the "Cambrian" and the "Cardigan" was a space of perhaps a couple of hundred yards. Thence to the "Montgomery," however, was quite a walk for Val of a morning—a quarter of a mile or more on towards the Trwyn. Of the three hotels the "Montgomery" was the largest. It had sixty bedrooms. Its stabling (for there was now a landau-service up into the mountains) blocked up one of Terry's dream-avenues a hundred yards from where the easy marble steps were to have descended to the shore. A wide metalled road ran past the three hotels, but it reminded you of unexplored rivers on an ancient map, which are traced for a score or a hundred miles, and then dissipate in interrogative dots. Another road at right angles ran past the Kerrs' Hafod to the gap opposite Pritchard's farm, and there were yet other roads, if those widish alleys bounded by stakes and wire could properly be called roads. When the wind rose the sand still whistled everywhere, scouring paint, rounding wooden corners, stinging faces; but so far it had made very little impression on a large, black, tarred notice-board firmly stayed into the sand midway between the "Cardigan" and "Montgomery" hotels, a board bigger than the whole front of the Kerrs' Hafod, which bore a straggling plan upon it in white, and the words:

To tell the truth, Llanyglo was now rather a dreary-looking place. They had broken its sylvan eggs, but had hardly yet begun the making of its urban omelette. The above-mentioned announcement was not the only one of its kind; there was another halfway between the Kerrs' house and Pritchard's, and a third at Pritchard's corner. These, it was known, awoke faint and distant echoes in little paragraphs in Manchester and Liverpool papers. The Company so far was a private one; it hardly knew yet what powers it might presently expect to possess; but Mr. Tudor Williams and others were finding out. As a matter of fact, they were rather anxious about these powers. An Act of Parliament two years before had seemed to promise them certain things that might prove immensely to their advantage; but of the two great Local Government Acts (of 1888 and 1894), the first was still in a plastic state, and the second not yet thought of. Hitherto Porth Neigr had been the centre of administration; it was now being sought to shift that centre. And, with the cumbrous old machinery of Boards of Guardians and Poor Law Overseers out of the way, Howell Gruffydd, it was whispered, might before long become a Councillor. Indeed, who would make a better one? Edward Garden? Edward Garden preferred to depute powers of this kind. The Laceys and Briggses, on a property qualification? These had their own affairs to attend to, and were summer residents only. John Pritchard? Stern John, as unchallenged ruler of the Baptist Chapel, was already a Councillor in a deeper sense than that defined by any mundane Act. William Morgan? Not substantial enough. John Roberts? Dafydd Dafis? The Squire?—The claims of all of them paled before that of Howell Gruffydd the grocer....

The leases were being taken up too. The Llanyglo Pavilion, Limited, was incorporated before a spade was set in the sand. The great blackboard between the Kerrs' house and Pritchard's Corner bore a significant diagonal paper strip with four fifteen-inch letters in red upon it—SOLD. Negotiations were proceeding for the acquisition of the land at the Corner itself. And Edward Garden had completed that rumoured purchase of his far up in the mountains. It was a "catchment area" for water, and if, under the new distribution, the Council should find itself possessed of large borrowing-powers, it might possibly find the private ownership of those hundreds of acres far away up Delyn an awkward matter.

And the excavation was already being made for the row of houses that later was known as "Ham-and-Egg Terrace"—a hundred and fifty yards of building that at first awed Llanyglo by its grandeur, but which they subsequently came to think a poor affair and did their best to conceal.

It was only partly for a holiday that those first visitor-discoverers came to Llanyglo now. Considerations of business had begun to play a part in their coming. Mr. Morrell, for example, had sunk quite a lot of money in the place, and liked to keep an eye on his interests. Philip Lacey pored over a dozen sketch-drafts of his Floral Valley, a project for converting a coombe or dean that clove one portion of the Trwyn into an ornamental arrangement of flower-beds with a bandstand in the centre. And Raymond Briggs mused on houses and hotels, on hotels and more and yet more houses. For these Llanyglo was no longer simply a place "delightfully rural," a place "where you could dress as you liked," a place for "a real rustic holiday." It was the Tophams who made these discoveries and bestowed these encomiums now.

Whether or not Barry Topham dressed as he liked, he certainly dressed as the Briggses and the Laceys disliked. At the Promenade Concerts his appearance had been just decently unremarkable; alas, it was so no longer! Now, in the country, he broke out into a loose tweed jacket, knickers made of a pair of long trousers of striped cashmere cut down, low shoes, a flannel shirt, no hat, and a tightly knotted red tie, this last as a voucher for the socialism that, Philip Lacey discovered to his horror, he talked in and out of season. He was a small, bearded, wiry man of forty-four or five, who gave you a curious impression of ferocity and mildness mingled. The mildness was perhaps due to his bolt-upright shock of frightened-looking sandy hair, the ferocity to the pince-nez marks on either side of his nose that gave his glance a concentrated look. His wife did not appear to dress (you cannot call mere concealment of the person "dressing") until four o'clock in the afternoon, and his two daughters, aged nineteen and twenty-one, were school-teachers, less buxom than Miss Nancy Pritchard, but more professionally eager, as if all the vital force in them had gone, not to the waste of mere pleasant flesh, but into the severer regions of the mind.

This taking of Llanyglo at its word in the matter of dress was bad enough, but worse was to come.

Scarcely were the Tophams installed at the "Montgomery" when it became known that, though they had appeared to come alone, they were merely an advance party. Two days later the main body arrived, and Llanyglo experienced its first social slump.

The party called itself a Holiday Camp. It was a union of two semi-secular, semi-Nonconformist Institutions whose idea of having a better time than their fathers had had was to botanise, to geologise, to read, and to discuss these activities afterwards in whirlwinds of communal talk. Strictly speaking, they did not "camp" at all: they put up at the "Montgomery"; but they had camped, hoped to camp again, and called their more convivial gatherings, when studies were cast aside, Pow-Wows.

They overran the place instantaneously. You met them with their brown canvas satchels and japanned tin specimen-cases, poking about up the Trwyn or groping in the boggy patches about Sarn. They were to be met in the lanes, carrying picnic paraphernalia. They lighted fires of driftwood on the shore, which coatless young men blew while the young women combed their hair out in the sun. And wherever they went a little red rash went with them, the rash of the small red-backed book, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, of which the contagion had raged among them. Not that they had not books of other hues also. They had Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone in green, and Selected Sayings of Marcus Aurelius in brown, and others in various colours; but it was the red that struck the eye at the greater distance. They and the books were inseparable. The unmarried ones, sharing a book between them, seemed already to be creating that sage community of intellectual interest that, as all the world knows, comes in so very handy when the first fires of love have become less devouringly hot; the married ones, with a book apiece, kept the calm connubial ideal before the maids' and bachelors' eyes.... And it was all exceedingly disquieting and difficult to understand. One hoped that the books were portals into high and fair and spacious places, but feared that they might be but pathetic posterns of escape from the world's weary drudgery that has got to be done and that therefore somebody must do. One had struggles of compunction and abasement and doubt, and the humiliating feeling that some clean and heathery and wind-swept place of the mind was being invaded to sadly, sadly little purpose. One tried, desperately tried, to tell oneself that if poor lame Harry Stone got one single half-hour's joy out of it all, nothing else mattered; and then one wondered whether even this was true. It is hard to be social over an anti-social thing.... So one bore, humble heart and arrogant heart alike, each his portion of Education's shame.

The coming of the Montgomeryites acted instantaneously. Within an hour of their issuing from their sixty-bedroom hotel, the Cambrians and their deck-chairs and bathing-tents had drawn a little more compactly together on the sands. Certainly the Cambrians did not see why they should take, intellectually, a second place to these loftily and botanically thinking ones, merely because they chose to pay a little attention to appearances also. Moreover, the fact that the Reading Party had come to Llanyglo only for a fortnight filled the Briggses and the Laceys with a certain compassion. This was not compassion that the ecstacies with which a zoophyte was discovered, or the glad cries with which a bit of sundew was hailed, must be such transient joys. It was rather compassion that the Montgomeryites should find the place pristine. Llanyglo "pristine"—now!... "Ah," they thought, "they wouldn't think that if they'd known it as we knew it—two houses and a single hotel only!" ... The thought opened a vista. Perhaps, in time to come, these Utopians would tell others how, when they first set eyes on Llanyglo, the place had not begun to be spoiled, but had had three hotels only, a dozen or so houses, Ham-and-Egg Terrace, and a blackboard here and there that had emphasised rather than detracted from its virgin charm. And these others would pass it on to others still, and so it would go on, and so, in one sense, Llanyglo would never grow. There would always be somebody who had known it before somebody else, and would say, "Ah, yes, but you ought to have seen it then!" ... Well, thought the Cambrians, perhaps it was a good thing. To have inferiors is one of the great solaces of Life, and they supposed that the Tophams also had their inferiors. Perhaps some day a tripper would look even on Philip Lacey's Floral Valley with much the same shock of delight with which Eve opened her eyes on the dew of Eden....

A sorely tried man now was Philip. Sadly he lamented the evening that had taken him and Barry Topham to the same Philharmonic Concert in Liverpool. For the starched and hotpressed ones of the "Cambrian," though they did not openly say so, held him as in a manner responsible for this inferior spilling all over their idyllic place. They seemed to be trying to make out that the Tophams were Philip's chosen friends. Philip felt this to be unfair. It was an accident that might have happened to anybody, and Philip's views on culture and the multitude were every bit as sound as Raymond Briggs's own. And as Philip did not intend to be sat upon by Raymond Briggs or anybody, he acted well, nay, even nobly. He had recognised Topham; very well. He had not positively encouraged the fellow, but say that certain narrow-minded persons wished to make it appear that he had done so; well again. He would stand by what he had done. He would ask the Tophams to dinner at his hotel.

He did so, and took the disastrous consequences. For the Tophams came, and, with the eyes of the whole "Cambrian" upon them, behaved for all the world as if they had been dining at their own inferior Liberty Hall of a "Montgomery." So at least it seemed to Philip, and bad enough surely that would have been; but Mrs. Lacey made it far, far worse. It was plain as plain could be (she said afterwards) that the Tophams' sprawls and freedoms were all put on, and that they had been like four fishes out of water every minute of the time—he ought to be ashamed of himself, showing them up before everybody's eyes like that!... "Come as you are," Philip Lacey had said, with the truest delicacy, since it was very unlikely that the Tophams had brought evening clothes to their Camps and Pow-Wows; and so nobody dressed. The "Cambrian's" tables were no longer arranged in the form of a T. With the installation of gas, numerous smaller tables, with a couple of large oval ones among them, had taken its place, and at one of the oval tables the four Laceys and the four Tophams sat. Mr. Lacey was at one end, with Mrs. Topham on his right, Mrs. Lacey was at the other end with Mr. Topham on her right. At the sides sat the younger ones, a Topham and a Lacey on either side. This was not the happiest of arrangements, since young ladies who have just "finished" in Paris usually think they have seen enough of school-teachers for some time to come, but it was the best that could be managed. Nor could Miss June kick Miss Wy under the table.

The discord showed from the very first moment. The Laceys, as urbane hosts, would have kept to such light and frothy conversational matters as how the Tophams liked Llanyglo, whether they had been up into the mountains yet, and similar subjects; but not so the Tophams. Briefly, they went for the eternal verities like four steam-navvies. Before she had unfolded her napkin, Mrs. Topham had Philip Lacey helpless in the toils of More's Utopia, and by the time she had asked him half a dozen searching questions, looking mistrustfully at him as much as to say, "You dare to lie to me, sir!" the unhappy man had to confess that it was some time since he had read the book, and that his textual memory was by no means as good as it had been. A second attack rendered him abject. The third was not delivered. Seeing him such a rank and pitiable outsider, Mrs. Topham contemptuously spared him.

"And this is the state of education to-day!" she said scornfully to her husband afterwards....

Mr. Topham, in the meantime, tackled Mrs. Lacey on certain problems of the Distribution of Wealth, with no happier results. Quite simply, Mrs. Lacey was unaware that such problems existed save insofar as they were included in the specific question of marriage-settlements for daughters. She scarcely troubled to answer Mr. Topham, but, glancing from June and Wy to the Misses Amy and Norah Topham, lost herself in the problems of the Distribution of Proposals instead. So she too, from the point of view of those who carried Mill and Smith in their pockets and read these inhuman authors in the shade of the crumbling Dinas, became an outsider.

But worst of all fared the Misses June and Wy; for the Topham sisters had brought with them from Liverpool a holiday-pamphlet, which consisted of forty-two questions, three of which, daily for a fortnight, the holiday-maker was advised to ask himself. So:

"As I came along the beach this afternoon," said Miss Amy to June, with a chatty note in her voice, but the enthusiasm for knowledge smouldering in her eyes, "I observed great quantities of seaweed. To what uses are seaweeds put?"

And said Miss Norah to Wy, slightly puckering her shining and melon-like forehead:

"One of the boatmen told me yesterday that in the Spring large masses of the vernal squill are to be found upon the hills near here. Why is this?"

Then Miss Amy again:

"There are fine examples of contorted strata on the other side of the Trwyn. Perhaps you or your sister can tell me the reason why these strata are contorted?"

And again Miss Norah:

"Who was Taliesin? When did he flourish? Tell me anything you know about him."

Dearly would June and Wy have liked to reply, in the words of Mrs. Briggs when the hotel-manager had looked at her boots, "Don't if it hurts you!" Wiggie nicknamed Miss Norah Topham "The Vernal Squill" on the spot; June, a phanerogam herself, dubbed Miss Amy "The Club Moss."

After that dinner, there was nothing for Philip Lacey to do but to live his indiscretion down.

But if this was the "Cambrian's" attitude to the "Montgomery," it was not that of the Welshmen of Llanyglo. These were now more in number, for half the staffs of the three hotels were Welsh, and others also had scented prosperity in the air. Within a few hours friendly relations had been established between the natives and the readers of Utopia. A Welshman's eyes will always sparkle at the sight of a book or other piece of the apparatus of knowledge, and the Montgomeryites, friendly souls all and ready chatters with whomsoever they met, began to drop into Howell's shop of a morning. None too reluctantly, they suffered themselves to be drawn out by Howell on the subjects of their studies, and then it was that Howell became a proud man indeed. For he produced Eesaac Oliver, home once more from Aberystwith College. Without even having the titles given to him as he came in at the door that divided the shop from the dwelling-rooms behind, Eesaac Oliver swapped them book for book. Howell's breast swelled. "Blodwen—Blodwen—come quick!" he called. Then, with his eyes sparkling like bits of mica in a pebble and his small teeth gleaming like a double row of barley, he looked fondly on the assembly and murmured, "Dear me, I did not know till to-day there wass so-o-a many books written!" One morning Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Garden came in in the very middle of one of these galas of the intellect. They were kept waiting for a minute and more. There were times when the Llanyglo Stores almost resembled a Debating Room.

It was left to the Misses Euonyma and Wygelia Lacey to restore the balance that their father's luckless dinner-party had disturbed; and right well they laboured to that end. They brought all the resources of Brighton and Paris to bear upon those two amiable but indefatigable school-teachers, the sisters Topham. They did not avoid them; on the contrary, they put their heads together and then went out in search of them. Then, when they had met them, they asked them to tell them whether it was true that the guillemot laid its blunt-ended egg in order that it should not roll off ledges, and whether the person who said that serviceable knife-handles could be made of the stems of the Great Oar Weed had been correctly informed. And when they failed to come upon their unsuspecting victims, they cathechised one another.

"As I was ascending the mountains the other day," June would suddenly break out in the Vernal Squill's raised and staccato voice, "I found myself walking upon grass. What is grass? State reasons for your answer."

And Wiggie, assuming the viva voce examination tones of the Club Moss, would ask her sister what a man was, and whether Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd could properly be classed as one.

Failing the turning up of those two marriageable brothers, the Misses June and Wy were likely to be what Mrs. Briggs called "bad to suit."

It was when the Utopia-readers had been at the "Montgomery" rather more than half their time that the first bruit went abroad of the jollification that presently made memorable the eve of their departure. Nor was this jollification to be confined to their own set. All (as afterwards at the Llanyglo P.S.A. Meetings) were to be welcome. The project was talked over, at first informally at the Llanyglo Stores, afterwards more seriously at the "Montgomery"; and a few days later the rumour was confirmed by print. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd and Hugh Morgan distributed a number of handbills, thrusting them into folk's hands in the stake-and-wire-enclosed streets, pushing them under doors, and even entering that Reservation on the shore where the Cambrians sat stiffly, reading their novels, toying with their fancy-work, or dozing after lunch. Then, on the land-agents' blackboards and in the windows of the Llanyglo Stores, larger bills appeared. Large bills and small alike read as follows:

Llanyglo Holiday Camp, July, 1887.
THE AIGBURTH STREET AND CHOW BENT
SQUARE UNITED READING CIRCLES
beg to announce that a
GRAND POW-WOW
will be held in the Dinas, the Trwyn, Llanyglo,
on
Friday Evening, the 22nd, at 8.30 sharp.
BRING YOUR REFRESHMENTS!
BRING YOUR VOICE LOZENGES!
BRING YOUR MUSIC!
BRING YOUR LANTERNS!
BRING YOUR FRIENDS!
Visitors and Residents alike are Welcome!
Songs!! Recitations!!! Short Speeches!!!!
LADIES SPECIALLY INVITED!
Grand Chief: Deputy Grand Chief:
Barry Topham, Esqr. Howell Gruffydd, Esqr.
Committee: ................
................
................
The Proceedings will open with the singing of
"God Save the People,"
and will close with "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau."
Edward Jones, Printer, Porth Neigr. 0616.

"Boy!" called Raymond Briggs, as Eesaac Oliver, having distributed this announcement to the occupants of the Reservation, was passing on; and Eesaac Oliver turned. "Pick those papers up at once!" Raymond ordered, pointing to a litter of handbills where the wavelets lapped the marge of seaweed. Then, over his shoulder to Philip Lacey, who reclined almost horizontally in the next deck-chair: "Making a mess of the beach like that! Paper wherever you go; they're as bad as a lot of trippers! Can't make out what you see in that fellow Topham——"

Philip, who was frowning over the handbill, spoke, also over his shoulder.—"You going to this?"

Raymond gave a short laugh.—"Me?"

It was almost as if he said, "I didn't ask them to dinner, my dear man! I'm perfectly free to stop away!"

"Good. We'll have a game of chess, then," Philip replied off-handedly. He could give Raymond pawn and move.

Outside the Reservation, however, little but the Pow-Wow was talked of. Howell Gruffydd had looked the word up in his little English-Welsh Dictionary, and, though he had failed to find it, he was none the less set-up at the thought of being a Deputy Grand Chief. But he became thoughtful again when there arrived for him a bundle from Barry Topham, which, on being opened, was found to contain a pair of very much creased moccasins, a broad-striped blanket, and a head-dress of feathers similar to the one the Grand Chief himself was to wear. Howell had remembered Dafydd Dafis. Dafydd might not like him to bedeck himself thus, and what Dafydd might think always mattered a great deal in Llanyglo. Dafydd, his old corduroys notwithstanding, stood for the integrity of Nationalism, and even Howell, willing to be English, must be careful not to be too English—or, in the present case, too Indian.

But the aliens themselves showed no such reserve. They had bracketed a Welsh name with an English one on their handbill, had placed Hen Wlad by the side of God Save the People, and been otherwise hearty; and they did not know that even in their hospitality they were a little bustling, urgent, and compelling. As for differences of race, such things were presently about to be abolished. So they bade Llanyglo almost boisterously welcome to its own Trwyn, and Barry Topham, passing Dafydd Dafis on the afternoon of the day of the celebration, shouted cheerily over his shoulder, "Don't forget your harp, Davis. I'm not going to call you 'Dafis'—we'll make an Englishman of you before we've done with you! Eight-thirty sharp.... Eh?... Stuff and nonsense! Fiddlededee! What sort o' talk's that, man alive! Of course you're bringing your harp!"

It was on a dullish summer evening, and none too warm up there, that the Montgomeryites, in threes and fours and sixes, began the ascent of the Trwyn. Some of them had already set match to their lanterns, though the Trwyn beam was not alight yet, and they carried with them more than one copy of The Scottish Students' Song Book. They tried their voices as they climbed, and called to one another, pointing out false easy ways and bursting into laughter when the misdirected ones had to return again; and the Trwyn sheep started up from before their feet and fled, baa-ing. The refreshments had gone on ahead, as also had the fuel for the camp-fire, but no Welshmen were to be seen yet. Perhaps, gruff heartiness notwithstanding, they felt that they were guests who should have been hosts. Perhaps they felt that here was not the urgency there had been on the only other occasion when they and the Saxon had rushed hurriedly and tumultuously together—that wild nightfall when Ned Kerr, from the roof of the new Hafod Unos, had seen something out in the lair of grey, and, with a cry of "Llongddrylliad!" Celt and new-comer had flung themselves into an open boat pell mell.

But by and by they also began to move in a body slowly along the shore, sometimes over the dry, sometimes plodding over their own reflections in the ebb. There was no pointing out false ascents to them. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, who came first, had fetched eggs too often from the Trwyn light not to know every cranny of the promontory, and his father remembered the building of the lighthouse. Howell had seen them, as a boy, locking and dowelling the great blocks of masonry, shaped each like an intricate Chinese puzzle; and in thirty odd years the Light seemed to have become almost as much part of the headland as the ancient Dinas itself. That seemed to be the way with building. Even Edward Garden's house seemed a settled thing now. So, in another year or two, would the "Montgomery," the "Cardigan," Ham-and-Egg Terrace. And Howell reflected that stones meant grocery-orders. But that was not all. If he must be English, but not too English for Dafydd Dafis, he must still be careful to be the right sort of English. He made little out of these Utopia readers. They simply came in under the "Montgomery's" contract. The Briggses and Laceys still provided the richer yield. Whether was the better—the "Montgomery," where one visitor would presently be creeping into a bed that his predecessor had left still warm, or these more prosperous ones, who, Howell knew, would presently come no more?... Moreover, he was already feeling the pressure of outside competition. Ellis, of Porth Neigr, was even now quoting cutting rates for the "Cardigan's" butter and cheese, and for a long time Llanyglo had had to depend on outsiders for its milk. The railway, that brought people, also brought their provender....

Oh, don't think for a moment that Howell was prospering without giving deep thought to things!

They gained the Dinas, where already the fire was yellow and crackling, and stood smiling Good evenings, as if they waited to be asked inside.

How long ago it was since the foundations of that Dinas had been sprinkled with the blood of Merlin—how long ago it was since the Red and White Dragons had contended about it, now one gaining the advantage, now the other—how long ago these things had been, not even Miss Amy Topham would have dared to ask June Lacey. Now it resembled a grey old heel of cheese, with a little scrabbling in one corner. This scrabbling was where Bert Stoy, one of the younger and most indefatigable of the Readers, had hoped he might find a British grave.

"We thought you'd maybe changed your minds about coming," were the words with which Barry Topham welcomed them. He was an Indian, but a bearded one, and he bustled here and there, wanting to know where So-and-So was, and whether this requisite or that had been brought up, and seeing to this and the other. The goblin shadows of eighteen or twenty of the Readers danced on the ruined works, and the sky behind their illumined faces was of a sad and leaden lavender hue. The lanterns made little patches in the short grass; matches lighted faces momentarily; and then suddenly there broke out over the shoulder of the headland and continued thenceforward, the Light. Red, red, white—red, red, white—it was numbing, intolerable. It dyed the clouds that seemed to sag over the earth as the ceiling-sheets sagged in the cottages, and its glare was not lost high overhead now, as it had been on that night when the Kerrs had rested for their "nooning" in the midst of their building of their Hafod. The staggering blaze passed not twenty feet above them, seeming to stumble and trip over the cloud-folds, and driving the revellers to fresh places with their backs to it. You would have said that those ancient Red and White Dragons had come to life again and were chasing one another across the rafters of the night.

Then Barry Topham, placing himself by a jagged tooth of rock, held up his hand for silence. He had motioned Howell Gruffydd to his side, and had pointed at somebody's cap. His fingers tweaked a tuning-fork; he set the vibrating prong against his teeth; he gave them a soft note—"Doh——" and then:

Then when it was finished, Barry again stood with uplifted hand. Caps were put on again by such as wore them.

"Not weft enough," was Barry's brief comment on the singing; the Welsh, unfamiliar with the air, had not sung. "Never mind; it might ha' been worse.—Now I'm just going to say a few words, and then we'll make a start."

And he began.

"Well, we've been here a fortnight now, and I think we've all enjoyed it. I have for one. Some of us has been up these grand mountains, finding out how they were made, and some of us has been improving ourselves among the rocks and on the shore. Some of us has botanised, and some's collected butterflies, and one and all we've read the books set down for us in the Syllabus. That's a job done, at all events.

"But I think we shall one and all admit that we've a great deal to learn about Llanyglo yet. There'd still be something to learn if we were to come here six, ten, twenty times. That's the grand thing about knowledge—we need never be afraid we shall come to the end of it. When we've read fifty books there's always fifty more. Ay, and there'll be another fifty after that.

"But we've got other things besides knowledge at Llanyglo. We've got health, health to keep us going for another year. And we've got friends, new friends. I think we can say," here he laid his hand on Howell's shoulder, "that we've all done the little bit that in us lies to break down prejudices and dislikes and racial differences. We've had our quarrels, us Welsh and English, in the past; no doubt there's been battles fought on this very spot; but that's all over, and, speaking as Grand Chief for the year, though unworthy to succeed Comrade Walker, who occupied this same position last year at our Holiday Camp at Keswick, I think I may say we've buried the hatchet now. So in the name of one and all I greet these friends of ours. I think it does us both good to come together like this. They're a bit—what shall I say?—on the poetical side, perhaps; more romantic than us; we're just plain, practical folk that has to tew for our livings; but what I mean is, it's a good thing for both of us to get to understand one another. We do understand one another now, and I'm sure we're all very glad to see them here." (Applause, and cries from the Lancashire men of "Good old Wales!") "You here that, Gruffydd—Comrade Gruffydd? That's hearty. That's Lancashire. No flowers o' speech, but we say a thing and mean it. And we mean it when we say we're very glad to see you indeed, and hope this won't be our last visit to Llanyglo.—And now I won't take up any more of your time. We've a long programme before us, and I see that the first item is——" he consulted a paper in his hand, "——is the old favourite, There is a Tavern. What's the key, Harry? C? (Doh, lah—lah, te, doh——)."

And with the singing of There is a Tavern in the Town the Pow-Wow began.

Did they come to understand one another the better for it? Were they who took part in that Pow-Wow so "poetical and romantic" for the one part, so blunt and rough and practical for the other? Did a score or so of Saxons suddenly and miraculously cease that night to belong to the world's most sentimental race, and were the hearts of as many Celts as miraculously changed? No doubt it all seemed simple enough to Barry Topham. Hard-rinded himself, but not without a generous juice within, he would have found it hard to believe that pulpier fruits existed, with a stone inside he would but crack his teeth upon. Perhaps—perhaps—it was not so; and yet—what, after all, can the victor do to the vanquished more than vanquish him?... Barry saw their smiles only, and for every smile they received they gave three. The jovial Campers became ever bluffer and heartier and fonder of them as song followed song. Nor did the Welshmen refuse to sing. Enlightened Young Wales, in the person of Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, was presently to be seen with his back to the intolerable Trwyn beam while the Dragons of the Light chased one another behind his head; and his voice was lifted up in Vale of Llangollen. Was the song a success? It was doubly a success. The blunt and genial aliens applauded him as a breaker of the ice, his compatriots applauded him as a stepper into the breach from which they themselves had hung back. Hardly had he sat down before he was beset with requests to hum the air all over again, in order that they might take it down in the Tonic Sol-fa notation.... Then, almost immediately, the clapping swelled again, and there were cries of "Harry! Harry!" Harry Stone, who had the voice of an angel, was allowed to sing as he sat, because of his lameness, and he could not be seen in his dim angle of masonry, but only the unhurrying but unceasing red and white spokes, that strode from afar over the sea, passed overhead, and were off on their wide circle again. Hearing his voice and not seeing him, you thought of a pure spring that gushes suddenly out of the dark and grudging earth.—Cannibalee, he sang——

It was poor enough stuff. Its words were a laborious parody, its harmonies exactly predicable; it was facetious or nothing, and it marred an original with a remote and deathly grace of its own; but these things were forgotten as Harry sang. To-morrow they were leaving Llanyglo. To-morrow they were filing back through that postern that had given them this, their fortnight's respite, from tasks too often ignoble, from cramped circumstances, from savourless lives. And it weighed on them, tenderly yet heavily. Next year seemed so sadly, sadly far away....

Harry sang; and the hands of young men sought those of young women in the blackness of the Dinas's shadows, and the married ones drew a little closer together, and there was no parody at all in the little soft punctuations of the refrain, in which every voice joined:

Edward Garden was right——

Edward Garden was right. That tender but heavy weight, so tender, so heavy that it bore down the stupid expression of the song, lay even on the Welshmen too. He was admirably shrewd and right. It would not be yet awhile—it was too early yet—but presently, as an advertisement for Llanyglo, an Eisteddfod—an Eisteddfod, say, when the holiday season began in July, and a Brass Band Contest towards its close in September....

They were still singing when they came down again, at eleven o'clock. You might have thought, from the way in which Barry Topham clung to Howell Gruffydd's arm, that he was slightly drunk, but he was not; that was only brotherliness and exaltation. He still wore the gala-dress of the Grand Chief, but in that particular Howell thought that he had come out of his dilemma rather well. The feather head-dress he had tried on had proved too big for his head, and in trying to shorten the band he had torn off the button, thus rendering the adornment useless. As for the striped blanket about his shoulders—well, it was a coolish night, and there is no sense in taking a chill when there is a blanket to be had to keep you warm. Even Dafydd would see that. So Howell had worn it....

And looked at from below again, the Trwyn beam no longer appeared a hunt of raving red and white monsters, but a little lonely thing, familiar and disregarded, old, wise, minding its own business, and meanwhile quietly opening and shutting an eye.