A discourse on mountains. Turf-cutters, and Moor haymakers. Twm rescues the lady of Ystrad FfÎn, and captures a highwayman, whom he brings in triumph to Llandovery.

Having travelled together a few miles further into the mountain, Twm expressed his wonder at seeing the turf-cutters and haymakers following their avocations almost side by side in this wild district. “Well,” cried he, “I know that much has been said, sung, and written, in praise of mountain scenery; and where ’tis truly romantic as well as wild, I am a great lover of it myself; but this before us is my aversion. Here no sound salutes the ear but the lonely cry of a few melancholy kites, hungry enough to prey upon one another; and no objects strike the eye but the flat tame desert, and a few wretched cottages thinly scattered over this desolate region, whose inhabitants are miserably employed in scooping peat from the marsh for their fires, or cutting their bald thin crop of hay from the uninclosed mountain—the gwair rhos cwtta, or moor hay, which, dispensing with the incumbrance of a cart or sledge, the women carry home in their aprons, as the winter maintenance of a half-starved cow. Even the shepherds and their flocks are wise enough to keep from this gloomy seat of starvation; but the dull plodding turf-cutters are numerous enough. To me there is nothing that associates more with squalid poverty than turf fires: the crackling faggot and the Christmas log, have their rustic characteristics; coal has its proud and solid warmth; the clay-and-culm fires of Cardigan and Pembrokeshire, formed of balls, and fantastically arranged by the industrious hands of fair maidens, are bright and durable, revealing the gay faces of the cheerful semicircular group—and above all, the smokeless cleanly stone coal: but turf, smoky, ill-savored, ash creating, dusty turf—recals the marsh and moor, rain-loaded skies, and fern-thatched cottages, whose battered roofs swept by the blast, discover the rotten rafters grinning like the bare ribs of poverty; and worse than all, the joyless faces of the toil-bowed children of the desert. I heartily agree with the sentiment of the old Pennill [152a]

“How gay seems the valley with rich waving wheat,
Fair lands and fair houses, with shelters so neat;
While the whole feather’d choir to delight us conspires,
There’s nought on the mountain but turf and turf fires.”

“And let me add,” cried Twm, with vivacity, “as indicative of my own taste on the subject, a Triban [152b] of my own composition.—

Three things—to my mind each with loveliness teems:
A vale between mountains that’s threaded by streams;
A neat white-wall’d cottage mid gardens and trees;
And a young married pair that appreciate these.”

“The mountains, like the plains and vallies,” replied Rhys, “have of course their rough and unsightly portions; but so very dear to me are the sensations connected with our Mountain Land, that I could kiss the sod of its dullest region, when I remember how it came the refuge of our war-worsted forefathers in the days of old, as the waned star of liberty seemed to have vanished forever from our sphere.” Rhys’s patriotic enthusiasm rose as he proceeded. “I could as soon twit my beloved mother with the furrows which time has ploughed on her brows, as censure the homeliest part of our dear mountains, hallowed of old by the tread of freemen, when the despot foreigner usurped the vallies.

“Freedom, amid a cloudy clime,
Erects her mountain throne sublime,
While natives of the vales and plains
Are gall’d with yokes and slavish chains;—
Then shrink we ne’er, unnerved as bann’d,
In the cloudy clime of the Mountain Land.

Turban’d in her folds of mist
Our Mountain Land the sky hath kiss’d
While on her brow the native wreath
Of yellow furze and purple heath;
The rural reign her vales command,
And the freemen’s swords of the Mountain Land.”

Twm felt the observations of the curate as a rebuke for his flippancies, and was about to clear himself from all suspicion of lack of nationality; but the latter at that moment looking up at the sun, declared the day so far advanced that he must of necessity instantly mount his horse and ride with speed, so as to meet the vicar of Llandovery at the place appointed; on which, directing Twm in the route he was to take, he rode off and left him to pursue his way at leisure.

After thus parting with Mr. Rhys, Twm made his way alone, wrapped in thought, and looking neither to the right or left, for several miles, but was at length brought to a stand by the discovery that the way he trod had ceased to be either a road or beaten path; and that he was actually pacing the trackless mountain, with the disagreeable conviction that he had gone wrong, without a clue to recover the right way.

Observing a bwlch, or gap, parting the mountains in the distance, where they rose to a considerable elevation, he naturally concluded that the road ran through it. Acting on this opinion, he hurried on, and was much gratified to find his conjecture realized, as a good beaten road presented itself to him. He entered it, and hastened on with the utmost alacrity, till he came to a cottage on the road side, opposite to which was an immense rick of turf, that at a distance looked like a long black barn. He called at the cottage, and asked if he was right in his route to Llandovery, “Right!” squeaked a thin old man who met him at the door, “God bless you young man, you could not be more wrong, as your back is to Llandovery, and you are making straight for Trecastle.”

This was mortifying intelligence; and the old man seeing Twm’s chagrin, asked him to walk in and rest himself, an invitation that he gladly accepted. “What, I suppose you thought to be at Llandovery to hear the great preaching there to day?” said the man’s wife, a little fat woman who was carding wool by the fire. “No,” replied Twm, “I never heard of any preaching that was to be there.” “That’s very odd,” rejoined the old man, “as the whole country has been crowding there, to hear the good Rhys Prichard, the great vicar of Llandovery.” “I have heard he is very popular,” said Twm. “Popular!” screamed the weazon-faced old man, as if indignant of the coldness of our hero’s eulogy, “he is the shining light of our times, and hardly less than a prophet; wisely has he called his divine book the Welshman’s Candle, for it blazes with exceeding brightness, and men find their way by it from the darkness of perdition. When it is known that his health permits him to preach, the country hereabouts is up in swarms, to the distance of two score miles and more. Then, the farmer forsakes his corn-field, the chapman his shop, and every tradesman and artizan quits his calling, to listen to the music of his discourse. Infirmity alone has kept me from going to hear him to-day; but my wife is no better than an infidel, and would rather listen to a profane fidler, or a vagrant harper, than to the finest preacher that ever breathed out a pious discourse.”

Here the little round woman retorted on her spouse, assuring Twm that he was a miserable dreamer, whose brains had been turned by the ravings of fanatical preachers; that some months ago he ran three miles, howling, thinking he was pursued by the foul fiend, when it turned out to be only his own shadow: and that when a patch of the mountain furze was set on a blaze to fertilize the land, nothing could convince him that the world was not on fire, and the day of judgement come, till he caught an ague by hiding himself up to the chin in the river for twelve hours.

All this the old man very indignantly repelled, and vowed that his courage was equal to that of any man breathing.

At this moment the violent galloping of a horse attracted their attention, and in an instant a horse and rider passed the door, but suddenly checking his speed he returned, and calling at the cottage door, asking in a tone of authority if a lady had passed that way towards Llandovery within the last half hour. The old man, trembling as he spoke, protested that no lady had passed for many hours; on which the bluff horseman told him as he valued his life, neither he or his wife should appear on the outside of the cottage door, till he gave them leave. The old man assured him of his entire obedience, when the fellow quietly crossed the road, and effectually concealed himself and horse behind the opposite turf-rick.

Twm, unseen himself, caught a full view of this burley horseman, and instantly knew him. He felt a conviction that in a few minutes a scene was to be acted, in which he was determined to perform himself a conspicuous, if not a principal, part. He asked the timorous old cottager if he possessed such a thing as a long-handled hedge bill-hook, to which the poor dotard, his teeth chattering the while, replied in the negative. On searching the cottage, with the assistance of his mistress, to its great vexation he could find no weapon, but a blunt old hatchet, and a rusty reaping-hook.

The canter of a light horse now struck his ear; his heart caught fire at the sound, and with almost fierce vehemence he called to the people of the cottage, “Give me some weapon in the name of God: to defend you and myself from having our throats cut;” but it only increased their terror and confusion.

In an instant, a lady on a slight white horse was opposite to the cottage, when the horseman, darting forward from behind the turf-rick, and producing pistols, demanded her money. The lady protested, in the most piteous and earnest tone, that she had accidentally left her purse behind, and must be indebted to a friend at Llandovery, should she fail to meet her husband there, for some small change. “I’ll not be disappointed for nothing,” cried the ruffian, “Dio the devil is not to be fooled, and my pretty lady of Ystrad FÎn, I have depended on a good booty from you to-day, so that unless in two minutes you strip, and give me every article in which you are clothed, a pistol bullet shall pass through your delicate body.”

The lady, with tears entreated him to be merciful, promising a future recompence; but the scoundrel laughed scornfully in her face, and cocked his pistol, on which she uttered a loud scream and fainted, when he immediately approached to strip and rifle her.

Our hero, whose blood was boiling with honest indignation, now started up from behind the lady’s horse, and stood on a small bank raised to separate the cottage yard from the road, struck the highwayman an astounding blow on the temples, with a stout hedge-stake grasped with both hands, and repeated the violent action till it brought the desperado senseless, and covered with blood, to the ground. After the first terrible blow, confounded as he was, he instinctively presented his pistol at random, but Twm struck him heavily on the extended arm, which caused it to fall, and swing dead by his side, like a withered oak branch smote by the thunderbolt.

The good woman of the cottage bathed the lady’s temples and soon brought about her recovery; and great was her surprize and satisfaction to witness the result of our hero’s courage and dexterity. While tears of gratitude suffused her beautiful eyes, and ran down her bright ruddy face, Twm in the gentlest manner assured her of her entire safety, and that he would have the happiness of conducting and protecting her to Llandovery, where he intended to bring the highwayman dead or alive, and deliver him, with an account of the whole affair, to the magistrates.

The lady of Ystrad FÎn, smiling as she spoke, uttered many expressions of her gratitude, and admiration of his courage, assuring him that her husband, Sir George Devereux, would not allow him to go unrewarded for such a signal piece of service: “but for my own part,” continued she, “as I truly assured the merciless highwayman, I am at present without my purse, having left it accidentally at the house of a poor sick person, whom I visited, relieved, and stayed with, many hours this morning, by which I have missed hearing the sermon preached to-day by the rev. Rhys Prichard.” Twm declared he did not in the least feel himself entitled to any reward, sufficient for him was the approval of so beautiful and amiable a lady; but that he had another gratification in the action he had performed, as it was his fortune to have punished the very man who had once stopped him on the highway and robbed him of his little all.

It was in vain that Twm summoned the old man of the cottage to assist in placing the robber on horseback, as he had hid himself beneath the bed, roaring all the while “Oh lord! oh dear! I shall surely have my throat cut.” The lady of Ystrad FÎn, however, alighted and lent an active hand in binding the thief, still insensible, with old halters contributed by the fat woman of the cottage, who also gave all possible assistance; so that with their united aid Twm soon got him across his own horse, like a sack of barley, and secured him by tying him neck and heels under the horse’s belly. Our elated hero leaped into the saddle, and rode side by side with the lady of Ystrad FÎn, and conversing freely with her, unincumbered with his former bashfulness, till they reached Llandovery.

They entered the town just as the sermon was over, and the dense swarm, as they issued from Llandingad church, stopped and gazed with astonishment at the sight presented to them. At the same instant that Sir George Devereux came up and assisted his lady to alight, Mr. Rhys the curate approached Twm, and each in a few minutes was in possession of the whole story. The baronet eagerly grasped our hero by the hand, and assured him of his protection and favor to the utmost of his power; declaring at the same time that no possible reward could equal his deserts or repay his services.

As soon as it was known among the farmers that the terrible Dio the devil, who had robbed many of them at different times, was captured, a subscription was immediately raised, to reward the captor; so that our hero was soon in possession of a sum little less than ten pounds, in addition to five more that the county awarded for the taking of a highwayman.

Sir George and his lady invited our hero and Mr. Rhys to dine with them the next day at Ystrad FÎn, where the baronet said they would discuss in what manner he could repay the services of the brave deliverer of his lady.

The constables were now called to bring their hand-cuffs, and take possession of the robber, but in vain;—for when he was uncorded and taken from the horse, it was discovered he was dead.