“I have a pair of real little beauties,” went on the chemist’s wife, beaming at us between minarets of Eno’s Fruit Salt and Mellin’s Food, “just the{6} thing for London work. I’ll have them round at the hotel for you in ten minutes.”

We were conscious of social shrinkage as the work for which we required the ponies was explained; a fortnight’s road work in Wales, with the proviso that the animals would have to carry packs—“large packs,” added Miss O’Flannigan—held a suggestion of bagmen, not to say tinkers. But Mrs Williams’ stable sank unhesitatingly to the level of our needs. She had yet another pony, three years old, thirteen hands high, steady, “and bin ridden with the Yeomanry,” she ended, reassuringly.

From the eye that Miss O’Flannigan cast upon me I knew that her mind was, like mine, occupied with a vision of the Yeomanry mounted, like cyclists, on “dwarf-safeties,” and we ventured to ask whether the St Bernard, whose eyes gleamed from the dark corner of the shop where he lay, pantingly protruding a tongue like a giant slice of ham, had been ridden during the training. The jest had a high success, and a suetty giggle{7} from somewhere near the open door of the parlour apprised us that this gem of Irish humour was not lost on the apprentice.

Before we returned to the hotel several things had been accomplished. We were possessors of the chemist’s pony for a fortnight; we had bakingly retraced our steps to the ironmonger, and by dint of remaining immutable on the top of the cottage stove, had made a like bargain with him; and we had interested Welshpool more whole-souledly than any event since the election and the last circus. Coolness and peace awaited us at the Royal Oak Inn, with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days, wonderfully striking to an Irish eye, accustomed to connect antiquity with dirt and dilapidation. We have nothing hale and honourable like these hostelries, with their centuries of landlord ancestry: we have the modern hotel after its kind, and also the unspeakable pothouse, with creeping things after their kind; but antiquity, if such there be, is a poor, musty{8} ghost, lingering among broken furniture and potsherds, to sadden the eyes of such as can discern it.

Ireland seemed a long way off, while we lunched largely and languidly on fruit and cream, and wondered how we were going to ride through four counties in heat of this kind. A sense of inadequacy grew upon us like a slight indigestion, or, perhaps, it came to us in that guise, and the fussy clatter of ponies’ hoofs in the yard below had a ring in it of the inexorable. Miss O’Flannigan sharpened a pencil and began to make notes, evidently to restore her moral tone,—notes about Welshpool, she said, antiquities, and such things; but as subsequently these proved to consist of the entry, “Saturday, June 10, ‘Black and White,’ lunch, Academy, headache, tea, tried on, &c.,” with a bulbous profile of the ironmonger, her method of working back to ancient history must have been mystic and gradual.

While we thus sat dubious of ourselves and all things, expecting to hear that the chemist and{9} the ironmonger had alike thought better of it, there was a shuffling of many feet in the hall, and the door opened to its widest to admit an immense old lady, advancing with the solemnity of a hearse, while two daughters of some fifty-five or sixty hard-won years moved beside her like pall-bearers, supporting each a weighty elbow on their lean arms. A third daughter walked behind, carrying a white dog of the Spitz breed. As a foundation-stone sinks to its resting-place, so, and with a like deliberation, was the old lady lowered into the largest and, indeed, the only possible chair; one daughter shut the window, another rang the bell, and a meal of fried beef-steak, onions, and bottled stout was ordered. The temperature of the room seemed perceptibly to rise, and Miss O’Flannigan and I communed by glances as to whether we had energy to get up and go away.

“Eh! it’s warm, vera warm,” said the old lady, addressing the company in general, but ceaselessly examining Miss O’Flannigan and me with eyes as blue and bright as those of any heroine of inex{10}pensive fiction; “it mak’s a body p’spire vera free, that it dew. But ye dew enjoy it——”

She spoke with a Yorkshire accent as broad as the foot which, in its cloth shoe and white stocking, was handsomely displayed below her skirt hem—and we apologise for probable mistakes in the reproduction by an Irish hand of that sturdy, grumbling drawl.

“Ah’m come all the way oop fra’ Yorkshire for a too-er,” she went on; “t’ yoong folks like a change,” she indicated her grey-haired attendants, “but Wales is a bit dool when ye come out for a holiday. Eh, Scarbro’s the gay, bonny place! Eh, but ye miss a treat if ye don’t see Scarbro!”

She held us with her glittering eye, and the eulogy of Scarborough proceeded with the burr of a noontide bee, by promenades, hotels, family histories of friends who kept lodgings in the best terraces, and many other highways and byways; while the three daughters and the white dog sat and filled in the mesmeric effect, immovable as scenery. A message that the ponies were in the{11} yard came at last to our relief, like good news from a far country, and with the activity of a hunting morning we made our exit in the wake of the waitress, who, at the Royal Oak, as at many other Welsh inns, has worthily replaced the waiter and the cheerless glory of his evening suit. The needed fillip had been given; the present moment, with its release and its ponies, sparkled suddenly, and that Wales which the old Yorkshire woman found so “dool” by comparison with Scarborough, lay awaiting us in restored glamour.

The large, clean yard, with its respectable coaching and fox-hunting associations, was acquiring a new experience. The loafers had detached themselves from the lamp-post, the tide of commerce had flowed from the shops to stand round the stable doors, and discuss in the guttural, shrewish Welsh tongue what manner of she-yeomanry they might be who thus requisitioned Welshpool ponies for their own undivulged purposes. There was a dead silence as we came forth, hobbling and{12} waddling in our fettering safety habit-skirts—a silence, as we hope, of admiration, but we have not inquired into it. The ponies were there—a bay of a little over fourteen hands, a chestnut dun of a hand smaller, both ill-fitted by their big saddles, both possessed of a generous contour that told of long summer days of revelling in the young grass, and summer nights of serious gobbling of it when the flies were asleep. Mr Williams the chemist, and Mr Griffiths the ironmonger, stood at their heads, and began a species of funeral oration upon their virtues, and upon the pangs of parting from them; while an attendant, with his knee against the side of the bay, and his head buried under the flap of the saddle, exerted what strength was in him to overcome the pangs of meeting exhibited by the girths and their buckles: nothing remained for us except to mount, and to trust that we should be spared disaster in the eyes of Welshpool.

Miss O’Flannigan asked the name of the bay pony, and having ascertained that it was Tom, com{13}manded that he should be brought to the mounting-block. Tom, a three-year-old of precocious gravity, erstwhile bearer of the kettle-drum and possessed of the serious good looks of one of Mrs Sherwood’s curates, reluctantly approached the hoary limestone block, with a horrified eye fixed on Miss O’Flannigan as she awaited him in her safety skirt. Persuasion failed to bring him within three yards of a garment which, as he doubtless expressed it, would have made Mrs Sherwood turn in her grave; and Miss O’Flannigan was finally pitched on to his back from an indefinite spot near the stable door, whither, with one foot in the stirrup, she had hopped in pursuit of her steed. It was damping to find that the name of the chemist’s pony was Tommy, but we felt sure that in the first few minutes of our first journey we should think of something clever with which to re-christen both. We subsequently spent several hours of several journeys in this endeavour, but their baptismal names have not as yet been improved on.

“He iss a little unused to the town, marm,” said{14} the chemist’s stable-boy, as Tommy submitted with unexpected calm to the infliction of my weight; “but he iss goot—yes, indeed!”

“He iss a little unused to the town, marm.”

The next moment I was pursuing Miss O’Flannigan up the street like the conventional pattern of a flash of lightning. Happily, the houses, carts, barrels, and other objects possessed of terrors for{15} Tommy alternated on either side with tolerable regularity, so that one shy acted as a corrective to the last; but these advantages were denied to Miss O’Flannigan. Her Tom fled along before me, cantering with the fore and trotting widely with the hind legs, and making startling attempts to turn in at unexpected side entrances—attempts that were only frustrated by serious effort on the part of his rider.

It was somewhere during this rush through Welshpool and its environs, while the saddles rolled and our faces blazed, that we were conscious of passing a building like a Methodist chapel, from which came men’s and women’s voices, singing in harmony. It was only a moment’s hearing, but it lived, ringing and resonant, in our ears, and is notable still to us as our first experience of Welsh voices. When, at sunset, we returned dishevelled and hairpinless, but masters of the situation, Miss O’Flannigan had remembered several quotations from the poets to express the effect of these keen, strong voices flung out into the sleepy afternoon.{16} I, regarding the heat-stained coats of the Tommies and Miss O’Flannigan’s back-hair, could remember nothing except the conversation of two men at a race meeting in Galway—

“Did ye see them skelping round by Glan corner?”

“I did not, faith.”

“Then ye seen nothing.{17}”

CHAPTER II.

There are no suburbs to Welshpool. Practical, like its countrywomen, it does not trail a modish skirt across the meadows; the woods and hedgerows run down to it, but it will not change its working-dress and come up from its hollow to be idle with them. Of this, indeed, we were not disposed to complain, when at some three of the clock on the next afternoon we started on the first stage of our journey. We had received, in the act of departure, an amount of interest and attention that would have satiated, not to say embarrassed, a sandwich-man—from the congregated friends of the chemist and ironmonger, from the old Yorkshire woman (framed like a Holbein behind the glass of a firmly closed window), from{18} the exponents of fashion in baggy breeches and slim gaiters who habitually “practised at the bar” of the hotel, from the carriage of an unknown magnate, and from the pit and gallery section which had early possessed itself of the best places on the central lamp-post. The subtler observation of villa residences was at least spared us, the vulture eye of the tradesman’s widow behind the lace curtain, the scorn of the offspring of the dentist or the auctioneer.

Powys Castle and its woods towered aloof in a shimmer of heat, as unaware of town and tourist as the cattle within its gates. The grey houses of the town became smaller and older looking; cats sat on the doorstep and mused on the deceitfulness of things, overawing the languid dogs in the eternal supremacy of mind over matter; and the flame of sunshine blazed tangibly round us and all things. Our last impression of Welshpool is of its oldest house, a black-beamed cottage, lolling and bulging, crooked and bowed in every line; impossible as to perspective, but strong and{19} stable beyond all houses in the town—so the town says. Then the hedgerows, and the white road stretching westward into the unknown. Elder-bushes, with their creamy discs; dog-roses of every shade of pink gazing at us with soft innumerable faces; honeysuckle in thickets; perfumes lonely and delicate, perfumes blended and intoxicating. The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to the saddles.

The mention of the hold-alls disperses like an east wind all ideas of the indolent and the picturesque. Briefly they may be described as was a kitchen-maid in a Galway household by an enraged fellow-servant—“She’s able to put any one that’d be with her into a decay.” We had spent the morning in packing them, in repacking them, in acrid argument as to whether Miss O’Flannigan’s painting-box (apparently made of lead and{20} filled with stones) would fit in my hold-all with the teapot, tin kettle, india-rubber bath, shooting-boots, drugs, and other angular things which had been already bestowed in it; in punching fresh holes in the straps, in going to the saddler to have more “dees” put on the off-sides of the saddles, and finally in a harrowing parting with our portmanteaus, which, labelled “Dolgelly, per goods train,” had been delivered to the hand of the boots. It was the burning of the ships; and while the smart, tightly-belted hold-alls were hoisted like plethoric grooms to their saddles, we looked back to the portmanteaus, and said, with a hope no larger than Brutus had, “If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed.”

For about two miles we crawled at a walk in the heat,—the drab Tommy niggling, shuffling, and plodding; the bay Tom “dishing,” crossing his legs, and stumbling, but both absolutely laid out for goodness. Lulled to a false security, we ambled thus up and down the slopes, and prosed a little to each other about the scenery: plump,{21}

Packing the “hold-alls.”

{23}{22}

knobby hills, such as one would cut out of dough with a tumbler, with strips of wood straddling over them; rich valleys with their sides padded with dark-green trees, all complete and devoid of relation to each other, but all similar, like a picture-gallery full of replicas of the same landscape. This, we said, was not the kind of thing we had come to Wales to see.

A shaded stretch of road tempted us at length to urge the Tommies to their own wild trot, and to its vagaries we and the hold-alls rose and fell, bumped and joggled with what grace we might. Roadside heaps of stones, that had till now been merely matter for composed inquiry to the Tommies, became at this pace fraught with all supernatural powers and malign intents, and we cannoned violently and often, as Tom swerved, wild-eyed, from one of these objects of terror, or as Tommy, the ignoble, turned with incredible swiftness and endeavoured to flee home to the chemist. We persevered to the top of a steep descent, where the white dusty road fell away{24} from our feet, and there slackened as there came into view a cart drawn by four giant horses with solemn bowed heads and huge legs that gave them the effect of wearing sailor’s trousers, tight at the knee and full at the ankle. The trunk of a great elm lay on the cart, a “vibrating star,” as George Eliot has described the prone advance of such another tree, and on top of it sat a man in a blue linen coat, looking as unimportant as a squirrel in relation to the mammoth creatures who were accepting his authority. We looked at him with respect as the quivering bole of the elm-tree drew slowly level with us, but he regarded us not at all. His gaze was fixed on my hold-all, from whose gaping mouth, as we suddenly became aware, a sponge-bag and the spout of the tea-kettle were protruding.

“Hoy!” said the carter, pointing with his brass-ringed whip at something on the road behind us.

It was Miss O’Flannigan’s india-rubber cup, a noisome vessel from which she indifferently partook{25} of tea, bovril, and claret. We dismounted, and the saddles, released from the compensating balance of the weight that experience had already taught us to bring to bear on the stirrups, obeyed instantly the four-stone drag of each hold-all, and began to turn very slowly and steadily to the off-side. We collected the cup and some other scattered valuables, and then, while the flies closed in round us, we began the long strife with straps and buckles. The Tommies sidled, stamped, and snapped ungovernably; while the flies devoured us and them impartially, the girths were dragged to their last holes, the hold-alls repacked and strapped on again, and the reign of suffering that ceased not till our journey’s end was fairly inaugurated.

Cannoffice was our destination, Llanfair was to be our stopping-place for tea. I almost hesitate to mention that Llanfair is but seven miles from Welshpool; but it is, perhaps, better to state at once that we, and, still more, the Tommies, were above the vulgarities of record-breaking, unless, indeed, we can lay claim to our daily journeys{26} being the shortest hitherto performed by any Welsh tourist. It must have been five o’clock when we rode down the stony hill beside the no less dry and stony river-bed, where at any time, except in this rainless year, the water must swirl pleasantly below the grey village of Llanfair. Welsh villages are composed of nearly equal parts of inns and chapels, so that such names as “The Cross Foxes,” “Rehoboth,” “The Goat,” “The Grapes,” “Addoldy,” “Salem,” and “Bethesda,” greet the traveller in startling succession. We crossed the humpbacked bridge, above the fevered bed of the river, where the children sat and played at giving parties with many long drowned crockeries, and we rode the length of the little street and selected the last of the inns that clung to its steep sides.

It was the glimpse of oak settles and panels, and gleams of old brass and copper, that we saw through the open door of the Wynnstay Arms that turned the scale, already tilted by the vision of a fat ostler boy with gold earrings, who grinned