by a circuitous inland way. Still, one as regularly as I espied them in front cart passed me in the broad lowlands of me. beneath Rhiw. It contained three ser- I had the luck to be in Aberdaron vant-maids and a red-haired man with during the spring hiring-day. This a protrusive beard which betokened his great domestic festival - or otherwise ancient lineage. To the wise this indi- took place at Sarn, a market village cated hiring-time. So in effect it was. six miles away. It upset the economy The girls were changing their "mis- of a multitude of homes far and wide. suses," and seemed finely elated about From an early hour the lanes were it. At the invitation of the man I thick with flighty young women who mounted a large tin box in the rear of had given their mistresses notice, and the cart for a short rest. The box, meant to lease themselves out for the however, was grievously aslant, the coming six months at largely enhanced road was strewn with new stones, and wages; with carts containing farmers the quadruped trotted clankingly. Ten and their wives in quest of servants minutes of this exercise more than and farm hands; and with loose-limbed sufficed. Once I was constrained to men in black carrying boxes under clutch at the neck of the nearest maid their arms which held all their worldly to keep myself from going, and all the kit, and which, with themselves, they while I had to hold on grimly to the were anxious to transfer to a new edge of the box. They laughed rarely | régime. The fair sex without excepwhen I at length slid off and panto- tion were imposingly attired. I cannot mimically signified both my thanks and say they were dressed up to date. the discomfort their civility had occa- They told me in Aberdaron at the milsioned to me. But I caught them up linery shop that the servant-girls of the at the Rhiw Hill, where the woods district do not care for a fashion until looking seawards were blue with hya- it is two or three years old, somewhat cinths, and in which cuckoo and thrush crusted in fact. But there was no seemed to be vying with each other in doubting their taste in bonnets. They sweet suggestive song. A squirrel also wore them as large nearly as the narran up an elm-tree by my side and rowness of the district lanes would shook his pretty tail in defiance or permit. Seen in the Sarn market-place appreciation of me. the damsels were suggestive of nothing so much as a grove of palm-trees with rather short trunks.

One is astonished at the amount of population this headland supports. Land's End in Cornwall is desolation The evening of this important day to it. True, there are not here two or was devoted to revelry of a kind scanthree hotels, each claiming to be the dalous to the stricter Welsh people. first and last in England. But tiny There was a slip of a circus in the homesteads dot the uneven land high village, and some gingerbread stalls. up the hills which finally close the These, with beer, made up a gala occapeninsula with their abrupt reddish sion of a very emphatic kind. The cliffs laved by the blue sea. They are carts reeled home through the night. queer, prim little dwellings, with neat Their noise and that of their occupants enclosed fields around them and banked awoke me several times during the walls between, so broad that the people dark hours. And the next day those use their summits as thoroughfares, of the servant-girls who had got their even as the dogs of the district use wages in advance (a five-pound note them for perches whence to assail the or so for the half-year) trooped into stranger when in the mood. These the village and indulged themselves en Welsh dogs are unmannerly brutes. masse with new gowns and bonnets. One of them speedily tore out ટી. In my innocence I had hoped that mouthful from my knickerbockers, the peninsula world would abound in and the precedent once established, I Welsh women wearing their ancestral came to expect an attack from them sugar-loaf hats. No such thing. Even

had

the most old-fashioned of crones here | heavily homewards to satisfy nature's would have elevated her nose at the cravings, resolved, however, to return idea. At the millinery shop there to the churchyard as soon as possible were none such on view, though at my for digestive purposes. request they searched a loft to which It is a tranquillizing little place, the dregs of the market long, long ago | quaint and secluded rather than beautibeen ignominiously consigned, ful. Yet its sands are of the right kind and thence they brought two mournful for children, with fantastic red boulders time-stained hats a foot and a half embedded in them, and, in a southerly high. The people of the house laughed wind, with substantial waves bowling at the things much as you or I might after each other into the bay. Its ridicule a Cromwellian leathern jacket. | dearth of social diversion is only what The words “Paris make" inscribed you would expect. That accounts for within seemed to fully entitle the hats the otherwise culpable manner in which to all the scoffs they excited. the people lounge from door to door in Life in Aberdaron cannot claim to be quest of morsels of piquant gossip. funious in pace at any time. The two Much of this gossip came to my ears score white houses of the village seem while I lodged at the millinery shop. to hob-a-nob amiably, though in a It was transparently trivial for the most drowsy manner. It is the same with part about the approaching death of the villagers themselves. They keep a some old inhabitant, or the near advent few boats, three or four public houses, of a new inhabitant; the brisk interand as many shops. These last are for change of ill words between two ladies, the seduction of the people from the mistresses of adjacent houses; or the country round, who sidle hither at all absurdity of the bonnets in which the hours of the day for a spell of dolce far two twelve-year-old Owen girls (just niente or some beer. There is a ven-out to service) had invested on the erable church hard by the sands of the bay; indeed, it is held to be about the oldest building of the kind in Wales. Its aisle-walls are pleasantly decorated with coffin-plates. In its churchyard, which has been picked at by the spring tides much as little boys and girls "sample" the loaves for which their parents send them to the bakers' shops, are a number of elegant slate monumental slabs, vertical and recumbent. Upon these the more reflective (and perhaps poetical) of the villagers love to recline while they pass spasmodic remarks. Their eyes roam over the confined waters of their little bay, with the steep cliffs of Pen-y-kil away to the right. Thus they spend agreeable if inactive hours, moving their quids from one corner of their mouths to the other. Their wives and daughters may be heard bustling about with pots and pans and basins in the back yards of the cottages behind them. At times In at least one respect I was foolish the women break into shrill song. The ere exiling myself at the toe of the waves and the wind are an accompani- Lleyn. I carried with me no more ment to it. And when dinner is ready cigars than my case held. These went the gentle idlers among the tombs lurch in a day. Then I made such an outcry

strength of their hire-money. There was also, as there was bound to be, no small amount of undisguised flirtatiou between the swarthy young men with rings in their ears and the somewhat pretty girl who kept the millinery shop. Swarthy young men with rings in their ears ought not to want articles of millinery, but they seemed to. And while I sat in my dusty parlor - with divers stiff, uninteresting, clerical gentlemen on the walls-quite late of an evening, these lazy young seafaring fellows cracked their jokes with the girl till the laughter became loud enough to distract me. I dare say the maiden was well endowed with tact. At any rate, she came to see me periodically, and told, with deep sighs, of the weariness of spirit the young men and their inanity brought upon her. For all that, I have little doubt she will marry one of them some day.

for more that the village was requisi- | towards nightfall when I had had a tioned for cigars. The millinery girl surfeit of the cliffs and gorse hills and conjured her swarthy friends to see if primrosy lanes of the neighborhood. I they hadn't a box or two of "smuggled never heard so many larks sing at smokes in their houses. The inns, once as here, over the fields east of the too, were searched. But it was to no hills which end the peninsula. I never purpose. Aberdaron does not favor smelt so sweet an open-air perfume as cigars. It likes a black sort of tobacco that from the hyacinths on the sloping with a very strong smell, and so cheap meadows under the lee of the great that I am ashamed to mention the turf walls which here divide property price. To this I was compelled to turn from property. I will not say I never my attention. A pair of simple un- saw fairer prospects than that from the waxed clay pipes were provided at the Anelwog Mountain (some seven or same time. I am somewhat infatuated eight hundred feet high) which falls with nicotine, but never was the precipitously towards the western sea; strength of my infatuation more se- but it would not be gross exaggeration verely tried. I smoked myself into a if I did say so. Thus the three noblest series of mad headaches, and wondered of the senses were satiated; this, too, what the brains and stomachs of the under a warm May sky, with caressing Welshmen of the peninsula could be zephyrs from the Atlantic, and a pleasmade of. urable feeling that, had I tried ever so, I could hardly anywhere in the realm have got more effectually away from: "the madding crowd" without crossing the sea.

Further, I had few books with me by no means enough to carry through the evenings of my stay. This cast me upon the local literature even as I was thrown upon the local tobacco. The majority of the books that were offered me were in Welsh. But also there were divers volumes of sermons in English by a famous Keltic Calvinist. These were fine reading for wet, stormy nights. Were I of a more convertible disposition thau I am, I should have been won by the preacher's eloquence to a complete assurance that I had not two chances in a thousand of escaping eternal damnation after death. The odds are long, but they seemed to me enough, sinner though I am.

Add to these comparative deprivations the fact that there are no French cooks in Aberdaron, and that my meals were eked out methodically between eggs and bacon, tea, bad beer, and the potted contents of the general store of the village, and you might suppose I was not at all happy, but was rather of my own free will suffering penance for some notable misdeed.

Was it a wonder that when I had made myself drowsy with the scented air, and had seen the sun vanish beneath the transfigured Atlantic, I was not in the humor to find fault inordinately with poor little Aberdaron for lacking theatres and concert-halls for being, in short, the vacuous, somnolent little village it is?

But another object of interest must be mentioned. From Anelwog, and much more from the extreme cliffs of Braich-y-Pwll, Bardsey seems very near to the mainland. It really is only about two miles from Braich-y-Pwll. there is no port here. From Aberdaron the island is about five miles of roughish current, which very little wind makes the mariners of the village shake their wise heads at.

But

It is rather a sacred and mysterious little isle, this of Bardsey. I had been led to believe its inhabitants were as irreproachable as if they were in Para

That, however, were a very erro-dise. This illusion was dispelled one neous view of the matter. Even Aberdaron and its roughnesses were entertaining for a time. But Aberdaron was only the stake to which I had tied my tether, and to which I reverted

evening. A sudden noise of voices broke into the house from the domestic - not the shop- entrance. The shrill tones of women clashed with the deep and very thick, broken utterances of a

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man. They talked, or rather clamored, | question, there is a measure of truth in Welsh, so I had no conception what it. The ruins of the abbey at this day was in the wind. Curiosity was not to are a witness to the importance of the

books.

be resisted. I left my room and saw little island many centuries ago. The my pretty milliner, her mother, and the abbey has been associated with Dubrimaidservant all heavily impelling up cius, Archbishop of Caerleon, who died the narrow stairs an aged man whose in Bardsey in A.D. 522. Rather less white hair tossed almost to his shoul- than a hundred years later occurred ders, and whose semi-circle of snowy that outrage by King Ethelred upon whiskers and beard made him look like the monks of Bangor-is-coed in FlintMoses or Abraham in the picture- shire, which seems to have spread The man was loth to ascend, panic among the Christians of the and resisted. But the women all had northern part of the principality. him hard in the small of the back and These disestablished believers fled to declined to give way. Thus they urged Anglesey in thousands. Many of their him to the first floor and into a bed- names are preserved for us in the chamber, where he collapsed immedi- names of the churches which sucately upon a bed. They locked the ceeded the remote hermitages in which door and left him, heedless of his they ensconced themselves. Llanmonstrous cries for a supper to consist flewyn, Llanbeulan, Llanrhwydrys, of roast beef, porridge, and tea. etc., are but the churches of Flewyn, Beulan, Rhwydrys - holy men who never expected thus to go down the avenue of time memorialized for posterity. But the monks also fled down the Carnarvon Peninsula, striving to get as far as possible from the cruel hands of the pagan marauders. They were stopped temporarily by the red

This was a Bardsey islander over for the day, or the week, as the weather might please. He was a relation of the shop, but had spent his best hours at one of the inus. This same venerable reveller astonished me on the stairs the next morning by greeting me civilly in English, and wondering (in a dubious manner) if he could have a soda-and-dish cliffs of Braich-y-Pwll. brandy. They sent him up a teacupful On a level plateau of grass and of milk instead.

Bardsey is the property of Lord Newborough, who owns so much territory in the north-west of Wales. It is a possession full of honor, if we are to believe the accepted tradition that twenty thousand saints lie buried in it. The lord of the isle has erected a monument to their memory in the precincts of the old ruined abbey; nor does he reduce the number of them by a single one. At first sight you might doubt the island's ability to hold the bones of So many mortals ; but really it has a circumference of about three miles, which, manifestly, may suffice. The modern islanders are, as they ought to be, a byword of integrity and sobriety e at home; but perhaps it is a pity the righteous influence of their native place C does not cling to them more effectually when they are away from it.

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This legend of Bardsey's saints demands explicit recognition. Out of

heather here where the land looks towards Bardsey, only two miles away (though with a strong tide between), and about a hundred and fifty feet above the sea, there may still be discerned the outline of an embanked enclosure within which buildings formerly existed. This locally goes by the name of Eglwys Fair, or Our Lady's Chapel. That is all that tradition tells us on the subject. It may have been a chapel like those so common in the south of Europe on marine headlands

- beacons of hope and safety for Christian sailors; or merely a place of pilgrimage. But also it may have been founded and supported by those exiled "religious" from Bangoris-coed en route for Bardsey. It is enough that it is there. We may frame various interesting conjectures about it. For my part, I would fain imagine that the chapel of Our Lady of Braichy-Pwll had a considerable existence

and was incorporated with a monas-on the ocean that has endeared itself tery; and, further, that after the death to them. You would expect these of the successive inmates, they were superannuated mariners to be rather ferried over the flood to their last rest- heedless of the dangers attendant upon ing-place in Bardsey. It is quite cred- the sea and its currents. In the Faroe ible that a thousand or two of the Islands and elsewhere there is an anBangor-is-coed monks and their Chris-nual and relatively large mortality due tian flock sheltered and died in the to storms and capsizes. But here at island, even though common sense Bardsey years pass and there is no puts the question, "How could they death from natural or accidental causes. exist here ere they died?" With the The islanders are not to be bribed to dead bodies of these Christians and cross to Aberdaron or from Aberdaron those of the monastery of Our Lady of when the weather is risky. A soverBraich-y-Pwll we may readily justify eign or two more or less can make but the later chroniclers (who were seldom little difference to their material prosgood at arithmetic) in telling of the perity, and they seem sufficiently philotwenty thousand Bardsey saints. sophic to perceive it. Much more to Thus may be explained this unique their taste is it to stand at the doors of characteristic of the little island. The their cottages and prattle about past subject has been provocative of a host times. These travelled ones talk very of scoffs — so much so that the island-passable English, though they interers themselves have given up defend- lard it with Welsh mannerisms which ing their country's reputation in the matter and shake their heads with the majority. But it does not deserve to be smothered in ridicule as a mere lying tale.

may well make the Londoner smile. They have adventures enough to relate about storms and fanatic foreigners; nor does it signify overmuch that they strain at the long-bow to excite The modern folk of Bardsey cannot the interest of the ladies. There is but be influenced more or less by the something taking about the hard-feahalo that is about their land. They tured but placid old fellows, with their are a simple, law-abiding community-lurching gait, fluent if rather labored the women in particular being engag- speech, and their simple clay pipes in ingly ignorant about events in the which they smoke the disagreeable great world of which they are a part, black tobacco of the mainland. though a small one. They have not much to commend them to admiration externally. Constant exposure gives them very tawny complexions, and though they have strength they have few of the graces that on the mainland often accompany strength. They are thick - limbed, heavy - featured, and rather dull to the eye. But all this is of scant account to their discredit in comparison with the homely virtues that are certainly theirs. A person of experience could recognize them at a glance as inhabitants of a remote island.

Among the men, not a few have travelled far and wide as sailors and fisherfolk ere settling down on this gorse-clad rock. They find the island. thoroughly congenial. It is a sort of compromise for them. They are on They are on dry land, and yet it is as if they were

I hope this little paper may have shown, as I meant it to show, that with all its crudity and defects the Lleyn is not at all a bad place for a holiday. It certainly affords in full measure those two best features of a profitable change of residence: novelty and a good air. In summer one can endure with smiles a certain amount of discomfort. Moreover, I doubt not I have made more of the failings of the Lleyn folk than I need have done; while, on the other hand, a keener or more amiable visitor would probably discover in them a variety of virtues which the casual strauger does not discern in them.

I walked to Aberdaron from Pwllheli, but returned by the coach. This was an amusingly odd final experience of the ways of life in the peninsula. We