The family of the Welsh farmer. Not a bright look-out for our hero.

Morris Greeg, the farmer to whom the parish had consigned our hero, as an apprentice, possessed a small freehold farm, fourteen miles up the mountain; and thither, in the company or custody of Watt the mole-catcher, Twm was now marched. Dull and joyless was their journey, unenlivened either by incident or the charms of scenery. On their arrival at the destined spot, Twm could scarcely forbear shuddering at the prospect before him. The farm-house was a low long building, under the same roof as the cow-house and stable, and as the whole was covered with a black mass of rotten thatch, composed of varied patches of half-perished straw and fern, the only signs of its being inhabited by humanity were a chimney, with two or three farm implements lying at the hovel door.

The farm, called Cwm y Gwarm Ddu, (Black marsh dingle,) was abbreviated usually to Gwern Ddu; the latter word, be it known to our English readers, is pronounced Thee. The land of which it was composed, had been anciently cribbed from the mountain, according to the Havod un-nÔs [72] system. Being too remote from any other settlements to be noticed by any of the parishioners but the shepherds, who were bribed to silence by occasional refreshment as they passed that way, the appropriation remained long unquestioned. And when of later years some of the nearest farmers became troublesome busy-bodies on the occasion, a few days’ labour given gratis in harvest time by Morris Greeg’s grandfather and father, made all quiet again, till latterly, the farm of Gwern Ddu became incontestably a freehold property.

Twm felt no great wonder that its existence, as narrated by Watt, remained so long unknown, and wished an earthquake had been so good as to swallow it before he had been destined to enter its precincts.

“It was in sooth a landscape harsh.
On one side rock, and three sides marsh:
With naught to please the restless eye,
A scene to cause a weary sigh.”

The farm occupied one side of a dreary dingle, being one field’s breadth only from the rocky mountain above, and divided from a swampy turbary marsh by a roaring torrent-like brook. The house and the farm appertainments, with a view to shelter at the expense of a healthier foundation, were situated on the marsh-side of the brook, the waters of which were crossed by a rustic bridge formed of a fallen tree, that led towards the fields, and by a short lane and a path through the wood, to the mountain above them. Instead of the hawthorn, willow, birch, and the nut-bearing pleasant hazel, that usually form the hedges in more favoured lands, these poor little fields had their boundary ditches surmounted by that rude bantling of barrenness, the prickly gorse, more poetically called the yellow-blossomed furze; intermingled here and there, as in the adjoining mountain, with its brunette sister, the purple-flowering heath, immortalized in Scottish literature as the mountain heather.

Above the rustic bridge, the bright pure water, yet unpolluted by the touch of man, rolled in a small cascade over the smooth black rock, contrasting by its foaming whiteness, with the sable bed from which it sprung. This little water-fall was called—Y Pistyll, or the spout; from which was obtained the water destined for household uses. From its side the farm lasses scooped the gravel wherewith they scoured their milk-pails, hoops and staves, rivalling by their whiteness, the nectarious stream within. Below the bridge, the brook had been widened by human art, so as to form a considerable pool, wherein the aquatic members of the farm-yard, the stately silent geese and the noisy ducks, at times floated gravely, with their young yellow brood, at others, ploughing and gambolling merrily and undisturbed; save when the horses, cows, or oxen were driven across; for the upper part of the pool formed part of the regular road.

Through this wood, ran an oblique path, that after turning the corner of an angular rising whose upper end was bounded by a terrific precipice of no less than ninety feet perpendicular height, and known by the name of Allt y Craig Llwyd, or Acclivious Forest of the Grey Rock, which indicated that trees at some period clothed the scene now defaced by hideous nakedness. On winding round and gaining the summit of the peak above this quarry, an extensive tract of level mountain appeared in one direction; in another, the dreary monotony was broken by the appearance of petty lakes or mountain pools, on which floated at times certain families of migratory aquatic birds, that here made their temporary resting place, in their hasty journeys to more favoured regions. Ravines, and caves, the reputed bed-chambers of evil spirits, long-maned unbroken horses, and numerous flocks of wild-looking small sheep, were the other objects that diversified the scene; and the horizon was closed by the distant mountain peaks, one above another, wildly strange, but most grandly clustered.

On Watt’s presenting Twm to a tall, gaunt, swarthy-faced man, who proved to be Morris Greeg himself, as the apprentice which the parish had sent him, his brows contracted, and his sunken eyes threw out their fires in a flash of indignation.

“Ha!” cried the old man, after eyeing our hero with the contempt which a sordid clown might evince towards a puny insect, as he wondered, in the dulness of his conception, why heaven should trouble itself in creating a thing incapable of hewing wood or carrying burdens—“a pretty help they have sent me truly! Of what service will a weak creature like this be to me?”

“None!” screamed a thin hag of a yellow-faced woman, “but to eat up all the victuals; I warrant, by his thin carcass and long crane neck, that he has the stomach of a hound. This neck looks as if it had been stretched already. But if it hasn’t, it soon will be by the looks of him.”

Four damsels, the daughters of the house, now made their appearance, and scrutinized our hero over each other’s shoulder, as if he had been a reptile of some unquestionable species, whom it was not safe to approach too near. A sturdy ploughman in a white frock sat at the table, silently, but sullenly, descanting on the merits of the food before him, by alternately sneering and masticating what appeared to be more necessary to his stomach than agreeable to his palate. On the left of the ploughman sat a singular-looking thin parrot-nosed boy, the only one that appeared to greet him with a look of welcome; his small black eyes actually laughed with satisfaction.

“Well, Moses, thou hast now a companion to help thee to devour food, and do nothing,” said farmer Greeg, as he motioned to Watt and Twm to sit and eat.

“Yes, thee hast now a companion to help thee to eat and do nothing,” repeated the farmer’s eldest daughter Shaan, whose habit it was to echo all the sayings of her father and mother, so as to publish herself as one of the authorities of the house. Moses said nothing audibly, but a rueful expression of countenance gave it the lie to the insinuation most pointedly, and Twm fancied that he brushed away a tear with his sleeve, as he rose hastily and walked out of the house.

Watt had been busy “taking stock” of the ploughman’s countenance; a compliment apparently by no means appreciated by the object of his regard. The ploughman hastily finished his dinner, and was about to beat a retreat, when Watt enquired, “Is’nt thy name Abel Prosser?”

“No!” cried the man.

“Yes,” cried Shaan, “what does thou deny thy name for?”

“Then, I have a warrant against thee, as the runaway father of Palley Bais Wen’s bantling,” cried Watt; “help to secure him in the king’s name!”The man made a dart from the house, and Watt after him. The event of the chase remained long unknown as neither were seen again by the present party for many a month.

“The devil take that Watt Gwathotwr!” screamed Sheeny Greeg the farmer’s wife, “for he brings us nothing but trouble. Two years ago he brought us this Moses, the deserted bantling of a rascally Jew, who deceived the silly wench of a hedge-ale-house maid, where he lodged; and now he has brought another of no more strength than a grey-hound puppy; and worse than all, he has scared away Abel Prosser. What are we to do now?”

“Do!” cried Shaan scornfully, “we shall do very well; make these two fellows do Abel’s work, and their own.” With this very comfortable prospect before him, Twm went to rest with the Jew boy in the hay-loft, this first night after his arrival in the alpine region of Cwmny Gwern Ddu.