‘And how is that, Winnie?’ I said, as she adjusted my crutches for me.

’After I’ve said “Amen,” I always say, “And, dear Lord Jesus, don’t forget to love dear Henry, who can’t get up the gangways without me,” and I will say that every night as long as I live.’

From that morning I considered her altogether mine.  Her speaking of me as the ‘dear little English boy,’ however, as she did, marred the delight her words gave me.  I had from the first observed that the child’s strongest passion was a patriotism of a somewhat fiery kind.  The word English in her mouth seemed some-times a word of reproach:  it was the name of the race that in the past had invaded her sacred Snowdonia.

I afterwards learnt that her aunt was answerable for this senseless prejudice.

‘Winnie,’ I said, ‘don’t you wish I was a Welsh boy?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said.’Don’t you?’ I made no answer.

She looked into my face and said, ’And yet I don’t think I could love a Welsh boy as I love you.’

She then repeated to me a verse of a Welsh song, which of course I did not understand a word of until she told me what it meant in English.

It was an address to Snowdon, and ran something like this—­

                Mountain-wild Snowdon for me! 
                Sweet silence there for the harp,
                Where loiter the ewes and the lambs
                In the moss and the rushes,
                Where one’s song goes sounding up! 
                And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher
                In the height where the eagles live.

In this manner about six weeks slid away, and Winnie’s visit to her father came to an end.  I ask, how can people laugh at the sorrows of childhood?  The bitterness of my misery as I sat with that child on the eve of her departure for Wales (which to me seemed at the extreme end of the earth) was almost on a par with anything I have since suffered, and that is indeed saying a great deal.  It was in Wynne’s cottage, and I sat on the floor with her wet cheeks close to mine, saying, ‘She leaves me alone.’  Tom tried to console me by telling me that Winifred would soon come back.

‘But when?’ I said.

‘Next year,’ said Tom.

He might as well have said next century, for any consolation it gave me.  The idea of a year without her was altogether beyond my grasp.  It seemed infinite.

Week after week passed, and month after month, and little Winifred was always in my thoughts.  Wynne’s cottage was a sacred spot to me, and the organist the most interesting man in the world.  I never tired of asking him questions about her, though he, as I soon found, knew scarcely anything concerning her and what she was doing, and cared less; for love of drink had got thoroughly hold of him.

Letters were scarce visitants to him, and I believe he never used to hear from Wales at all.