IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them, men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them. Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse. This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back, and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes both of school and Chapel was heated.

Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!

"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through them! And that iss not a roof—it iss only rick-covers——"

"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went. Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.

Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now affected to take a jocular view of the matter.

"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently—I think I start a Limited Company——"

But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr anxiously watched the tap.—"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he said grimly.

"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in, the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day—it set a s'ock-king example, whatever."

"And they call it 'ano-ther cup of tea,'" said a third.

"They very smart ones——"

Again John Pritchard's deep voice came in.—"They're very deep ones."

Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly.

"Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard! John Williams Porth Neigr, he say to me it would not surprise him if that Ned Kerr speak Welss so well as nobody if he wiss!"

A shocked "Aw-w-w!" broke out. "And he say in the Court, 'No Welss!'"

"Tut-tut-tut—de-ar me!"

They were silent for a moment, contemplating this duplicity.

"And there iss four of them now," one resumed. "They send into England for two more."

"We soon have large population," said Howell Gruffydd again....

John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow chairs with his knees a yard apart. His brows seemed knitted.

"But there is noth-thing for them to do here," he said. "No work, no wages—only building fences."

"Perhaps they have lot of money. Their bacon smell very good, whatever."

"They finiss their breakfast—I heard them wipe the frying-pan out as plain as if I see it with my eyes!"

Again John Pritchard's heavy voice: "Finiss their breakfast indeed! They finiss a whole barrel of beer!"

"And it is right what Hugh Morgan says," another struck in. "That Ned Kerr, he know Wales as well as I know my two hands! I have let-ter from my cousin Thomas Thomas in Towyn, and he say they buy lot-t of alders up the Dysynni two years ago of Mr. Llewelyn Jones of Abergynolwyn, and set up a hut in the 'ood, and make their clog soles, and pay six-pence a foot for the trees."

"He set up more than a hut at Llanyglo, whatever!"

"Indeed they do no such thing! The Hafod Unos belong to the old days. There iss no new Hafod Unos I don't know this how many years!"

"All the old things was new things once, Hugh Morgan."

Then, as if all at once they saw anew that house so magically sprung up out of the sand, there fell a silence. Howell Gruffydd might make his jests about taking a larger shop and forming a Limited Company, but the hard fact remained, that aliens had squatted down at Llanyglo while they had slept, and, by force or process of law, might be difficult to turn out again. Howell's jocosity subsided; among the children's forms and benches they took counsel together; and when, at half-past ten, John Pritchard's eldest lad came in with the news that one of the Kerrs had departed along the Porth Neigr road, while the other three kept guard over what they had won, they drew closer together still, and spoke in low tones of boycott.

Then suddenly somebody asked what Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys would say, and the quick little outburst of "Yes, indeed," "Well said," "Mr. Tudor Williams have some-thing to say," showed how pertinent the observation was considered. For Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member, would be able to tell them, if anybody could, whether the Hafod Unos was countenanced by the Law, and whether the intruders could be served with notice to quit. His promised visit now took on an added urgency.

"It is a pit-ty Mr. Williams fall out with Squire Wynne," Hugh Morgan remarked. "It will be the Squire who will have to give them notice, whatever."

"They quarrel one day outside the Court at Porth Neigr."

"But indeed, Howell Gruffydd, Mr. Tudor Williams wass in the right—it was about the Tithes, and the Tithe iss a wick-ked system——"

"Aw-w-w, but the Welss Members they alter all that very soon!"

"But the Squire and the Bis-sop of St. Asaph is great friends——"

"Indeed that Bis-sop of St. Asaph he look at a Chap-pil like as if it wass not worth his eyesight!"

Dafydd Dafis, who sat on a child's bench, looking moodily at the floor, had not spoken yet. He gave a quick glance up, and then looked down again.

"The Church iss a great robber," he muttered within his moustache....

They discussed questions of ecclesiastical polity....

"It iss a great robber," said Dafydd Dafis, again resuming his former attitude.

Then Howell Gruffydd rose, and one or two others followed his example. There was the day's work to be done. Soon all moved to the door, but before going about their businesses they went to take another look at that astonishing house.

But they looked only from a distance. If they had assumed that the Kerrs, having worked all night, would now be sleeping, they were wrong. They could see them, three of them, still busily walling, filling, shovelling out sand.

"They try to finiss before Sunday," Hugh Morgan said.

But big John Pritchard glared sternly at him.

"They care noth-thing for Sunday, those ones," he said. "That other one will have gone for more beer." And he added, in solemn tones, "It iss a den of li-ons!"

The fencing dispute had now sunk into insignificance.

It quickly appeared, even as John Pritchard had said, that the Kerrs cared nothing for Sunday. At a quarter to ten on the morning of that day, Howell Gruffydd, in his tight black frock-coat and bowler hat, passing up the sandy gully on his way to the Methodist Chapel, heard sounds of carousing. He turned aside to look. The door of the Hafod stood open, and a second barrel of beer, together with provisions and some sticks of furniture, had been fetched during the night. Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs, was already drunk and singing. The eldest of them, seeing Howell Gruffydd, gave him an insolently familiar nod, as if he had as much right to be there as anybody else.

"Cold mornin'," he said. "Are ye coming in to hev' a tot?"

Howell turned away.

After service, Howell encountered John Pritchard. John, too, had heard that godless levity from afar. Others gathered round them by the gap in the thymy earth-wall, and John raised his voice on high. It shook with bitter zeal.

"We hear them in the Chap-pil, in the mid-dle of prayers, singing!" he cried. "On a Sunday morning they sing; they sing 'Thomas, make Room for your Uncle!' I said it was a den of li-ons, but indeed no li-ons ever behave so s'ock-kingly! They sing 'Thomas, make Room for your Uncle,' in the mid-dle of prayers, like if it was out of the belly of hell!"

Dafydd Dafis, whose head for a day and a half had drooped like a wet head of corn, gave a quick gleaming glance.

"They not build it any more quick than it can be pulled down again," he said quickly. "They come out of the house sometime to work, I think. They not gentry with lot of money, whatever."

And that was true. The Kerrs could hardly earn their living by drinking beer and having continually to mount guard over the house they had made.

"There will be no peace in Llanyglo now till Mr. Tudor Williams has been."

Dafydd Dafis's head drooped again.

"Indeed we do not need Mr. Tudor Williams for this," he muttered under his breath.

And the Kerrs themselves? Did they suppose they could plant themselves thus in the enemy's midst and not meet with hostile entertainment?

For this we may perhaps go once more to the gentleman without whose friendly help the Llanyglo Guide would have been done quite as well as it needed to be, and in half the time.

"It's difficult to say, for two reasons," this gentleman said. "In the first place, the humour of some of these Lancashire fellows is such an incalculable thing; you never know how far they will carry it, nor how soon it will end in black eyes and bloody noses. And in the second place, there was that humanitarian scatterbrain, Armfield. I believe myself that probably Armfield had already told Ned Kerr that there would be work presently....

"Of course, you've heard what Armfield's scheme was. The Syndicate had decided not to rectify any more errors of Providence about the disposition of coal and manganese; they only wanted to clear out altogether, leaving somebody else 'holding the baby'—I believe that's the expression. Their idea was simplicity itself: to buy land at a shilling and sell it again at ten; but they didn't express it quite so nakedly. That was where Terry Armfield came in—to dress the enterprise up and make it attractive. As long as he enabled them to cut their loss they didn't care what he did with Llanyglo.

"And there was nothing really wrong with the scheme, except that Terry was twenty years before his time, and naturally had to suffer for it. I think he called it 'The Thelema Estate Development Company,' and nowadays it would be called a Garden City. And if Terry hadn't Edward Garden's sense of the line of least resistance, you must remember that he hadn't Edward Garden's 'inside' information either. He had nothing but that ecstatic power of persuading people. And he did persuade them. I doubt if half a dozen of the people he sold to ever saw the place. Two of them did, though, two brothers, in the produce line. They went down, and came back again, and quietly sold out, keeping strictly to Terry's representations; and I believe they warned Terry then that if he wasn't careful he'd be getting into trouble. I asked them what they'd been thinking of to let themselves be persuaded by a hare-brained enthusiast like that. They told me it was all very well for me to talk now. They knew perfectly well all the time that it was only one of Terry's dreams of a better and a brighter world, but they bought for all that, and so did crowds of others. Terry didn't admit a single difficulty. He talked about angels and the higher life. He talked about Pugin and the soul's need for seasons of contemplation and repose. He talked about the air and the sea and the mountains and the Trwyn, and he made it out to be Llanyglo's chief merit that it took a whole day to get there.... And so on. To cut it short, they were to do their own building, but Terry, as vendor, undertook the rest—laying out certain roads, draining and lighting them, I believe the building of a sort of public hall, and so forth. I don't think he said anything about the Chapels.

"And that (to get back where we started from) is probably the reason the Kerrs stood by."

Whether Dafydd Dafis would have watched the Kerrs out of the Hafod, or, failing that, whether he would have pulled it down over their heads, is hardly worth debating; for, as it happened, that very Sunday night there befell something that for the time being had all the effect of a declared truce between the hamlet and its invaders. Something deeper and more solemn than the machinations of man took a hand in the making of Llanyglo. This was the wind. It began to get up at about three o'clock that afternoon; all day there had been a swell; and Dafydd Dafis and others, returning from Howell Gruffydd's house (where a second letter to Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been written, as urgent as Eesaac Oliver's pen could make it), saw all four of the brothers on the roof, trying to secure the tarpaulin in which the wind volleyed; their roof-slates were not expected till the following Wednesday. The ground was a blurr of flying sand; the sea resembled a tossing fleece as far as the eye could see; and from moment to moment the waves, breaking over the Trwyn, rose in slow, gigantic fountains, fell again, and then came the roar. The four men clung like limpets to the roof, crouching until the worst gusts were past and then resuming their hammering. They were trying to nail the covering down, using pieces of wood as washers to prevent the material from ripping.

Suddenly Dafydd Dafis, looking up under his brows, saw Ned Kerr pause with his hammer lifted and peer out to sea. Then, without moving his head, Ned put up his hand and appeared to be shouting something to the others. All four looked, and so did the men of Llanyglo, but from the ground below they could see nothing.

Then, all in a moment, Ned Kerr gave a scramble and a spring, came down like a bundle into a mound of soft sand, and was followed tumblingwise by the others. There was a rip and a crack, and the released tarpaulin was a hundred yards away, flapping grotesquely over the sandhills. Ned was up again in an instant, and as he passed Dafydd Dafis at a run he shouted a single word in Welsh:

"Llongddrylliad!"

It was a wreck.

The boats by the short thumb of a jetty had not been used for a week, and lay high up the beach. Could they have got them through that boiling of white sea and brown sand there was a towering ridge to be seen beyond, maned with spray, that rushed forward and burst only to show another in the same place. No more than one at a time could be seen. The boats were open boats, and night was coming on. Small wonder there seemed little to do but pray.

But Ned Kerr shouted another word.—"BÂd!"

From the top of the Hafod he had seen a ship's boat.

The next moment he and Dafydd Dafis had each a shoulder to Hugh Morgan's boat, and William Morgan, the three remaining Kerrs, and another man, were hauling. All save the youngest Kerr continued to tumble aboard as the boat lifted. He tried to struggle after it, but was overturned, and they dragged him out and turned him upside down to pour the water out of him.

They have a lifeboat now at Llanyglo, The Ratchet, presented and maintained by the town of that name; but that night the men of Lancashire and the men of Llanyglo went out in one of the half-dozen open boats. They put her into the brown, and a moment later the water had slipped from under her and she sat down on the sand, with every plank started. They got ashore again as best they could, and raced for another boat and more oars. They put out again. They dare not use the wooden jetty, of which only the beginning could be seen. The first boat was already matchwood. A sea crawled up the Trwyn almost as far as the Light. They inspected its ravage the next day. It stood as a record for many years.

Then the boat passed the brown, and stood out to that pale wall smoking with spray. The wall came on and broke with a crash that shook the shore. A woman gave a shrill scream ... then they saw the boat again——

It seemed madness to think that that open boat would be safer out beyond——

After that, though they watched, they saw nothing.

Then the Trwyn Light opened its eye, two reds and a white. All Llanyglo was gathered on the beach, and none thought of going to Chapel. Night fell; the sky became clear as black ice; the dim seas resembled a lair of white bears at play. Seven o'clock passed, and eight.... Already in folks' minds the grim thought was born; it might have been worse. They had dragged Hugh Morgan back as the second boat had pushed off, and none of the Llanyglo men was married. Whether the three Kerrs were married or not nobody knew.

Nine o'clock came....

Blodwen Gruffydd saw the return first, if, indeed, that vague speck lost in the grey combings were they. Again the wave came on, and another hideous range lifted its grey ridge.... By a miracle, it boiled far away to right and left, but rolled, a grey-dappled dead weight, under the boat. Already half a dozen men with a rope were waist-deep in the water....

Then, as the boat crawled on its oars like an insect, another crest rose, tilted them so that man fell on man, and a man came out....

They at the rope were swept out by the backwash to meet them....

And after all, they had come back empty-handed. They had seen neither ship nor boat.

But (and this, in this tale of Llanyglo and of those who made it and were made by it, is the point), an hour later Dafydd Dafis, opening his eyes for the first time since he had been hauled out of the water, said something in Welsh to John Pritchard, who bent over him. Translated it ran:

"I would not pull that one's house down."

Then he closed his eyes again.

As far as the Hafod Unos was concerned, Mr. Tudor Williams's visit now seemed superfluous.