Seven English Cities eBook

The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the universe.  I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly refutive of that Englishman’s position.  I can only urge further the noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in which the English speech is so apt.  Otherwise I should say that nowhere have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in Wales.  The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which rather weary one in England.  They said “Yes,” and “No,” but as gently as if they had always added “Sir.”  If I have it on my conscience to except from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.

II

In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by the most energetic porter I ever knew.  They did not stare down upon us from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights reached by our American girls.  They would probably have competed fairly well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the good looks of either the men or women was of the American average.  I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry which is our peculiar blessing.  In Great Britain, though I must not say Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even tender youth.  The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.