customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and
herring to another. He first wrote the englyn
in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in
that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really
served me), he said he would put it into English,
and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both
ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough,
and if it had not the harp-like sweetness of the original,
it was still such a musical stanza that I shall always
be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore
of the common Welsh people which the incident suggested.
I could not fancy even a Boston grocer’s boy
doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy
in Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which
I have mainly forgotten, about the state of polite
learning in his country and in what honor the living
bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming
and singing little land, the poets are still known
as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or
Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men,
but up and down all Wales they are celebrated as this
bard or that, and are honored according to their poetic
worth.
After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace,
I could hardly have expected any livelier appeal to
my American pride, and yet it came, one day, when
I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing
our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public
function the members of the British Chautauqua.
How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since
spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our
national inventions which I should have expected to
find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably
in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping
with the summer conferences held beside our lovely
up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw
it, was a group of people from all parts of the United
Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment,
and they were now here on one of their summer outings.
They had been invited to a gentleman’s place
not far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a
remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was
my very good fortune through the kind offices of that
friend of ours to be invited with them.
It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort
commoner on the western Welsh coast than on other
shores of the “rainy isles,” but not too
common even there; and we drove out of the town through
the prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys
opening to the sea, on a road that was fairly dusty
in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped
and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and
blue slate roofs, and in places the children ran out
from them with mercenary offerings of flowers and song,
or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded
with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester
economist in my carriage, and denied them, when I
would so much rather have abetted them in their wicked
attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still
that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the
children who used to chase our wheels in Italy, and
I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us
as those did.
