"We'll take the little cable-tram, if you like, but it's not far to walk—twenty minutes or so—the Trwyn's seven hundred feet high. You'll see the whole of the town from the top. The sun will have made the grass a little slippery, but there are paths everywhere; the sheep began them, and then the visitors wore them bare. And we shall get the breeze....

"There you are: Llanyglo. You see it from up here almost as the gulls and razorbills see it. The bay's a fine curve, isn't it?—rather like a strongly blown kite-string; and the Promenade's nearly two miles long. But as you see, the town doesn't go very far back. From the Imperial there to the railway station and the gasometers at the back isn't much more than half a mile; the town seems to press down to the front just as the horses draw the bathing-vans down to the tide. Shall we sit down? Here's a boulder. It's chipped all over with initials, of course; so are the benches, and even the turf; but you'd wonder that there was a bit of wood or stone or turf left at all if you saw the crowds that come here when the Wakes are on. It's odd that you should never see anybody actually cutting them. Some of them must have taken an hour or two with a hammer and chisel, but I've been up here countless times and never seen anybody at it yet.

"Yes, that's Llanyglo; but look at the mountains first. This isn't the best time of the day for seeing them; the morning or the evening's the best time; the sun isn't far enough round yet. But sometimes, when the light's just right, they start out into folds and wrinkles almost as quickly as you could snap your fingers—it's quite dramatic. Foels and Moels and Pens and Mynedds, look—half the North Cambrian Range. You couldn't have a better centre for motor-cycle and char-À-banc tours than Llanyglo.... Then on the other side's the sea. That's only a tinny sort of glitter just now, but you should see the moon rise over it. People come out from the concerts on the pier-head just to have a look....

"The Pier looks tiny from up here? Yes, but it's three furlongs long for all that, and those two tart-tin-looking things at the end hold nearly a thousand people apiece. But, as you say, it is rather like one of those children's toy railways they sell on the stalls in Gardd Street for sixpence-halfpenny. And that always strikes me as rather a curious thing about Llanyglo. It's a big place now—nine thousand winter population; but somehow it has a smaller look than it had when it was just a score of cottages, all put together not much bigger than the Kursaal Gardens there. I don't know why the cottages should have seemed more in scale with the mountains than all this, but they did. I suppose it was because they didn't set up for anything, like the Kursaal and the Majestic and the Imperial.... But it doesn't do to tell the Llanyglo folk that. They look at it in quite another way. To them the sea and the mountains are so many adjuncts, something they can turn into money by dipping people at sixpence a time and motoring them round at four-and-sixpence the tour.... And sometimes you can't help thinking that it wouldn't take very much (a wind a bit stronger than usual or an extra heave of the sea, say) and all these hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of stone and iron and paint and gilding would just disappear—be sponged out like the castles and hoof-marks on the sands when the tide comes in—or like a made-up face when you wipe the carmine and pencilling from it.... Eh?—No, I'm not saying they've spoiled the place—nor yet that they haven't. You mustn't come here if you want a couple of miles of beach to yourself. It all depends how you look at it. If Llanyglo's cheapjack in one way, perhaps it isn't in another. It's merely that I remember it as it used to be....

"Would it surprise you to learn that the whole place is only about thirty years old? That's all. It grew like a mushroom; there are people who were born here who don't know their way about their own town.... Mostly Welsh? Oh dear no, not by any means. I should say about half-and-half. I suppose you're thinking of the Welsh names of the streets? They don't mean very much. There's Gardd Street, for instance; 'gardd' is only the Welsh for 'garden,' and Edward Garden, John Willie Garden's father, built the greater part of it (for that matter, he built the greater part of Llanyglo). And if anybody called Wood (say) had put up a house here, he'd probably have called it 'Ty Coed.' And some of it, of course, is genuine Welsh. The Porth Neigr Road does go to Porth Neigr, and Sarn, over there, has always been Sarn. But people think they're getting better value for their money if they come away for a fortnight and see foreign names everywhere; they've a travelled sort of feeling; so they give the streets these names, and print all the placards in two columns, with 'Rhybudd' on one side and 'Notice' on the other.

"And that's given rise to one rather amusing little mistake. As you know, this headland that we're on is called the Trwyn, and 'trwyn' simply means a nose or a promontory. But over past the Lighthouse there, there are the remains of an old Dinas, a British camp, and half these Lancashire trippers think the headland's called after that—'t'ruin'—'th' ruin'—you know how they talk....

"I'm interested in the place for several reasons (not money ones, I'm sorry to say). For one thing, I like to watch the Welsh and Lancashire folk together; that's been very amusing. And then, it's not often you get the chance of seeing a whole development quite so concisely epitomised as we've had it here. Llanyglo started from practically nothing, and it's grown to this before John Willie Garden has a single grey hair on his head (though, to be sure, that cowslip colour doesn't show grey very much). Then there's that curious essence—I don't know what you call it—the thing a town would still keep even though you cleared every brick away and built it all over again, and sent every inhabitant packing and re-peopled it. There's a field for speculation there, too, though perhaps not a very profitable one. But most of all I've been interested in seeing what various sets of people have given Llanyglo, and what it's given to them in return—how the stones and the people have taken colour from one another, if you understand me, and what colour—in fact (if it doesn't sound a little pompous) in Llanyglo as an expression of the life of our time. It's sometimes hard to believe that something almost human hasn't got into its stone and paint and mortar. The whole place, as it's spread out down there now—two-mile line of front, houses, hotels, railway, gasometers and all—has had almost a personal birth, and adolescence, and growing-pains, and sown its wild oats, and has its things that it tells and its things that it doesn't tell, in an extraordinary way—or else, as I say, it seems extraordinary, because you get it all into a single focus. There may even be a bit of me in Llanyglo. If you came half a dozen times there'd be a bit of you too.

"I should like you to meet John Willie Garden. He's the man to go to if you want to know anything about these streets and hotels and the seaside and the stations on the front. Why not come to the Kursaal, on the Terrace, at about nine to-night?—Good. He's a capital chap; a Something or other on the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, adopted Conservative Free Trade candidate for his division (but a Protectionist in other countries) and probably worth a quarter of a million, a good deal of it out of Llanyglo. Not bad for a little turned forty, eh? He'll probably ask you to dinner. You can't see his house from here; it stands back from Gardd Street. It was the first house to go up in Llanyglo—no, I'm forgetting. There was one before it—just one before it, not counting the original cottages, of course....

"What do you say to a turn? We've time to have a look at the Dinas before we go down....

"It's British, and the Sixpenny Guide will tell you all that's known about it—possibly more. Its foundations are said to have been sprinkled with the blood of Merlin. What's left of it's certainly sprinkled with these everlasting initials. The Trwyn Light's just behind, two reds and a white, and they're experimenting with the Rocket Apparatus, but I don't think that will come to much.—There's little Porth Neigr, look—and that point thirty miles away's Abercelyn....

"Now the mountains are beginning to show; there they are—Delyn on the left, then Moel Eryr, then Mynedd Mawr. That's Penyffestyn, with the great cavity in his side, and his shadow's right across Bwlch.... Yes, very fine, and a perfect evening for it. The posters at Euston don't overstate it, do they? Of course, you've seen that very familiar one, of a Welsh Giantess, shawl, apron, steeple hat and all the lot, holding a view of Llanyglo in her arms? Pink hotels, indigo mountains and chrome-yellow sands....

"There's the Queen of the Waters coming in. If we wait a few minutes longer we shall see the town light up. Yes, electricity; the power-station was finished only last year; it's over there beyond the filter-beds; Llanyglo handles its own sewage.... Ah! There goes the Promenade lights; three jumps, and the two miles are lighted up from end to end; the kite-string's a necklace now; pretty, isn't it?... And there goes the Pier.... There'll be a glare behind us like a shout of light in a moment—the Trwyn Light....

"The mountains are dark now, but how the day lingers on the sea! To-night it's like ribbon-grass.... Hear the post-horns? Those are the chars-À-bancs coming in. The last tripper's running for the station now.... Now the light's dying on the sea; it's a new moon and a spring tide. Two or three riding-lights only—I say, it's solemn out there.... But they'll be dining at the Majestic presently. That long golden haze is Gardd Street, and that spangle at the end of it's the New Bazaar. There goes the Big Wheel in the Kursaal Gardens, with its advertisement on it. We might look in at the Dancing Hall to-night; that's rather a sight. They have firework displays in the grounds, too, and last year there was one out in the bay; they put bombs and flares and serpents on rafts, and laid them from boats, like mines. That was in honour of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales....

"We'd better take the tram down, I think; we might stumble and break our necks....

"The other turnstile.—That kiosk place? That's the visitors' bureau. They'll tell you quite a number of useful things there—cab fares, porters' charges, time and tide tables, excursions and so on; but John Willie Garden can tell you more interesting things than those. Don't forget you're to meet him to-night....

"You're sure you can't dine with me? Very well. The Kursaal, then, on the Terrace, at a quarter to nine...."