Ostensibly, Mr. Tudor Williams came to Llanyglo to assist at a Sasiwn, which is a gathering very much like the Love Feasts of other parts of the country (indeed, if memory serves, Mr. Wesley gave these assemblies for prayer and mutual consolation the latter name as far north in Wales as Builth—but then Mr. Wesley did not speak Welsh). Neither the fencing dispute nor the question of the Hafod Unos had taken nominal precedence of this. But Mr. Tudor Williams's visit was also something more. He was a Member returning to his own constituency—exalted, yet their servant, familiar with the great ones of the land, yet by their favour. For that reason they liked him to bring the evidences of his greatness back with him.

Mr. Tudor Williams did so, and handsomely. He was a small nimble man with black brows and a ragged silvery moustache, and a very erect and conscious carriage of the head. He wore a silk hat, a turned-down collar with a flat black bow, a frockcoat with voluminous lapels of watered silk, grey trousers, and new black kid gloves. He drove from Porth Neigr in the carriage that had been lent him by a political supporter, and alighted at the gap opposite John Pritchard's farm. They would have run forward to greet him, but a certain awe of his clothes and equipage combined with their own dignity as makers and unmakers of such as he to keep them where they stood, in a semicircle across the road.

But if they were at one and the same time a little intimidated and filled out with pride in him, Mr. Tudor Williams knew no hesitation. He sprang down from the carriage, grasped John Pritchard by the hand, and then, not content with that, patted him all up the arm as far as the shoulder and across the breast with the other hand, as if he conferred invisible decorations on him. His eyes were moist, but glad greetings flowed from his tongue, in an accent that would have put the most diffident speaker of English at his ease.

"Well, John Pritchard! Well, well! Indeed you have not grown any less! A lit-tle man like me, I hardly reach up to your shoulder! Aw-w-w, you look splen-did! I was spik-king of you a few days ago to the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs—but dear me, here am I neglecting the ladies—I tell you presently—How are you, Mrs. Gruffydd? This young man is never Eesaac Oliver! Aw-w-w, how he grows! Did you write the let-ter to me, Eesaac Oliver? That's the style! Education, knowledge—it is a grand thing!—Now, Dafydd Dafis! And how is the harp? You sing me Y Gadlys by and by:

—dear, dear, you have to go away before you can come home again! There is nothing like this over there; there is not the sym-pathy; as I was saying to the Member for Caermarthen, Mr. Hughes Caegwynion, not three, four days ago, 'You get no sym-pathy from England and the Englishman'—and indeed you do not.—Here comes Howell Gruffydd, run-ning (indeed he runs like a deer, Mrs. Gruffydd!).—Now, Howell Gruffydd, you miss the train if you don't look sharp (he's making so much money he cannot leave the shop for a min-nit!).—Now, my old friend William Morgan! How is the rheumatics?—How are you, Hugh?—Is this your youngest, Mrs. Roberts? Hwhat! Another since! Aw-w-w—and you more like an elder sister than a mother!... And there is the Trwyn, just the same——"

He was staying the night with John Pritchard, and the two moved away to the house, the others following a yard or two behind. Mr. Tudor Williams advanced to ancient Mrs. Pritchard's chair, took the hand that resembled a dead bird's foot, and shouted in her ear:

"You see I do not lose a min-nit before I come to see you, Mrs. Pritchard!" he cried in Welsh. ("Indeed she is a wonderful old 'ooman!)—How many grandchildren have you now, Mrs. Pritchard?" (The old woman nodded her aged head.) "Great-grandchildren! No-o-o! Think of that! But I think you all live for ever at Llanyglo. It is not like London. If I could take bagsfull of this air back with me I make my for-tune!—Now, Miss Pritchard, I think I must have offended you, you are so long in spik-king to me! And how is all in school? I tell you press-ently something straight from the Board of Ed-u-ca-tion for you to try. You whisper a subject in the scholar's ear as he comes in at the door, and he walk straight to the middle of the room, no time for think-king, and speak for five minutes about it! That will make them ready speakers, hwhat? That will accustom them to public life and speaking in the Chapel? But I tell you later.—Now, my old friend John, if I could wash my hands before sitting down to a cup of tea—then we will talk——"

He was shown into the best bedroom, with the cork-framed funeral-cards and the cardboard watch-pockets on the walls, and the sound of his moving about and pouring out water and spluttering as he washed his face could be heard by those who waited below. Then he descended again and sat down.

"Well," he said by and by, from his place where he sat at the table alone, they respectfully yet proprietorially watching him eat and drink his tea, "now tell me about those matters in the letter you wrote.... I mean the other matters...."

But let us, before we pass to the other matters, look at the company that watched Mr. Tudor Williams eat.

First there was John Pritchard, sitting on the other side of the table with his hands upon his knees, and now and then turning his body a little aside and bowing his back to cough. There was John, stern religionist, believing in God and Disendowment; obstinate, dull, just, unsmiling; as ready for the Day of Judgment as if it had been the audit-day of the accounts he kept as principal trustee of the Baptist Chapel. For all that he was so rooted in Llanyglo that he had never travelled farther than Porth Neigr in the whole of his life, he was as ardent a supporter of Missionary Endeavour abroad as his voice was powerful at the Sasiwn at home. He watched Mr. Tudor Williams's plate, and with his thumb made signs for his daughter to replenish it.

Next, there was Howell Gruffydd, with his pale and studious son, Eesaac Oliver. You might have been sure even then that, should Llanyglo ever grow, Howell Gruffydd's fortune would grow with it. Howell considered a good penny worth the putting into his pocket, and, as if his apron (which, however, he had now left behind at the shop) had made half a housewife of him, he cared nothing, so it brought in money, whether he did a man's labour or washed up the dishes or black-leaded the grate. He could not read, but if at Porth Neigr a stranger chanced to ask him the way, he would smile and reply, "There is the signpost," allowing it to be understood that his questioner might read as well as he himself. Howell had his inner dream. It was of a shop with two large windows, and a bell inside the door, and brightly varnished showcards, and pyramids of tinned salmon, and peas within the window that should suggest the noses of children flattened against the pane, and handbills distributed in the streets, and two assistants, and a son at College, who should read for two, and perhaps—who knew?—sit while his constituents watched him eat his tea—Mr. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, M.P.

Then, with his cap in his hands and his feet shifting nervously, there was Dafydd Dafis, next to Eesaac Oliver, on the sofa. Should purchases and rumoured purchases of land prove to be a portent, Dafydd had all to lose and nothing to gain by change. With that soft cruelty of his of which the hard and more profoundly sentimental Englishman knows nothing, Dafydd was at least disinterested. The Kerrs he had forborne to harm, but he only hated them the more on that account. He himself would not have killed one of the blue and primrose butterflies that in the summer hovered over the Llanyglo buffets of wild thyme, and he could not understand a country that said it was fond of animals and yet, like these Lancashire men, hunted rats with terriers and coursed hares with dogs. Alone of that nation he had for a time loved delicate little Minetta Garden, and had told her stories of fairies and had sung Serch Hudol and Mentra Gwen to her; but Minetta had gone. All the things for which Dafydd Dafis cared had gone, or were going, and Dafydd was lonely. He told his harp so, with those warped and stealing fingers, and the harp made music of his pain. All that Dafydd would gain by change would be memories that became ever the more poignant the more they were attenuated, and the less the world cared for him and his unprofitable life.

Passing constantly between Mr. Tudor Williams and the saucepan where the eggs boiled, or the plate in the fender where the lightcakes kept hot, was Miss Nancy (nÉe Nansi) Pritchard, schoolmistress and virtual custodian of the Post Office. The development of Llanyglo, did that ever come to pass, would be a good thing for Nancy, for otherwise there was none in Llanyglo to marry her, and to domestic service elsewhere she could not have stooped. She was tall and plump and ruddy, with black hair and black-lashed blue eyes, and in her conversation she gave the preference to the longer words. She had been to school in Bangor, wore the longest skirts in Llanyglo, and between her and her father's guest was the bond of their common superiority to everybody else there. She was a partie, for John Pritchard was well-to-do; but for whom? Apparently for nobody whom Llanyglo had yet seen.

The remaining spectators, with the exception of old Mrs. Pritchard, who resembled a mummy rather than a spectator, partook in varying degrees of these same characteristics; and there at the table sat Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., of Ponteglwys, one of his eyes aflow with tears of sensibility while the other was glued to the main chance; Baptist, nationalist, and arguer by metaphor and analogy; an elocutionist, and a maker of elocutionists by that process of education that consists of giving a scholar a subject and bidding him straightway speak for five minutes upon it; and, above all, ever and again suggesting, by slight gesture or quick glance, that his secret thought was that there, in cap or corduroys, but for the Grace of God, went Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys....

At last he put up his hand, refusing to eat more.

"No more, no more indeed! It is the best bread and but-ter I have tasted since I was here before, but I should be ill in my stomach.—Dear me, John Pritchard, the happy hours I have spent in this room! 'Mid Pleas-sures and Palaces'—indeed there is tears in my eyes when I see the dres-ser with the plates on it, and the jugs, and Mrs. Prit-chard's Bible in the window, just the same as when I was a boy!—Well, I have had a splen-did tea at all events, and if you will excuse me a min-nit I will return thanks for it.... Now, my friends!—--"

Five minutes later, Mr. Tudor Williams, not so near to the Kerrs' Hafod that he had the appearance of specially watching it, nor yet so far from it but that he could see Ned Kerr and his brother Sam setting a rough window-sash into position, was once more shaking hands and patting shoulders and exchanging greetings with such of the men and women and children of Llanyglo as he had not yet seen.

And now that they had got him there they hardly knew what they wanted of him. That building exploit of the Kerrs having thrust the Inclosures Dispute a good deal into the background, and Dafydd Dafis's honourable if sullen refusal to injure men who had risked their lives with him having given that exploit itself a kind of condonation, it seemed as if their Member had merely come to a Sasiwn after all. But land had changed hands: they had a vague sense of impending change and of the discomfort of change; and, as they answered their Member's questions, the very presence in their midst of this man who moved behind the scenes of the drama of large events accentuated this feeling.

"What is he like, this one?" Mr. Tudor Williams asked, gently yet absent-mindedly patting big John Pritchard's back as he stooped to cough. They had been speaking of Terry Armfield.

They described Terry as he had appeared to them in the Court at Porth Neigr.

"Is he taking over any other land?" ...

You would not have supposed, from the way in which Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., asked the question that he merely sought to know how much they knew. And it had not occurred to Llanyglo that these transfers of land might be, not an end, but only a beginning. Yet Mr. Tudor Williams had good, if private reasons, for knowing that this very land might soon be more than merely worth acquiring.... He was not deceiving them. It pleased them to think that their Member was the repository of weighty secrets, and he was merely indulging this simple and legitimate liking. But already he intended to go to Liverpool in order to find out what this Syndicate's plans really were. He wanted to know whether the Syndicate, in its turn, was aware of something else, something still very secret indeed, so secret that five minutes at certain keyholes might have been worth many thousands of pounds....

"And this Hafod Unos—on whose land is it erected?" he next asked.

He made a little grimace when they told him, on Squire Wynne's.

"Then perhaps he will let it stand; he is cracked in his head about old customs, and antiquities, and suchlike foolishness, when there is great work wait-ing to be done. It is not our business if he likes to let these people squat upon his land."

But here John Pritchard interposed heavily.

"But it is our business if they sing 'Thomas, make Room for your Uncle' in the middle of prayers," he said.

"No-o-o!" exclaimed Mr. Tudor Williams, shocked. Perhaps also he wished to gain a little time; he had no wish to call upon Squire Wynne, either about this or anything else. "Don't tell me they did that!" he added.

"Indeed, they did," said John quickly.

"Aw-w-w!—But it is a Liberal maxim, John, and Radical, too, that force is no remedy. In my opinion our friend Dafydd here——" he put his arm affectionately about Dafydd Dafis's waist, "—was a lit-tle headstrong about burning the fences."

"I will not burn their house," said Dafydd sullenly. (By the way, had the case been altered, it is doubtful whether the Kerrs would have done as much for him.)

"Well—we can always take what the doc-tor told the man who wanted information for noth-thing to take—advice," said Mr. Tudor Williams.

"It would be better to see Mr. Wynne first," said John Pritchard. "If one comes others may come, and indeed I never saw such behaviour, no, not in a den of li-ons!"

They continued to discuss the matter, while, before their eyes, the Kerrs fitted their window-sash.

Yet it was curious to note how, within the bond of their passionate, if loquacious nationalism, each man was jealously for himself. It was not that their democracy was more conspicuously lacking in democrats than are other democracies; perhaps it was rather that the Welshman recognises two ties and two ties only—the tie of unity against the foreigner, and the private claim of his strong family affections. Between these two things is his void and vulnerable place. He has not set up for himself the Englishman's stiff and serviceable and systematised falsity of Compromise, that has no justification save that it works. He has his age-long tradition, but no daily rule that can (and indeed must) be applied without question. Each of his acts is his first act, and so a retail act. Because his hypocrisy lacks the magnificent scope of that of the Saxon, he bears the odium of a personal stealthiness. Thus, perhaps, it comes about that while too strict an adherence to the letter is the Englishman's ever-present danger, for his brother Celt the spirit slayeth. Noble dreams, petty acts; and here, if a little obscurely, may be hidden the reason why, when he seeks his fortune in London, his greatest successes are the minor successes of drapery and milk....

"Well," said Mr. Tudor Williams at last, "Wynne is a man of no ideas. He is only a pettifogging country Squire, whose views on the Land Question are ob-solete in tot-to. But if he harbours men that are a nuisance, as John Pritchard says, perhaps it would be better if I went to see him——"

Nevertheless, he had no intention whatever of doing so. The truth was that the Squire's views on the Land Question were too obsolete altogether. They were so obsolete that he had sold when (as first Edward Garden had known, and now Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., knew) he ought to have held; and it was for Mr. Tudor Williams to profit by his error if he could, rather than to call his attention to it. He was very far from being a wealthy man.