Seven English Cities eBook

Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and observed the watering-place life.  The town was evidently full, or at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach.  Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying.  All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief outings alone have.  The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore.  There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.

The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them.  Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.

VIII

I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle, and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect.  The stronghold was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans turned English.  Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell’s lieutenants destroyed it.  Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold.  It is near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an hour.  But we were none of these.  We had fallen in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken our lodging.  It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was none we would have.  Our successors were impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable.  Her ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against that.  Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in her nature.  We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to Llandudno.