ore familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.
Never a trace of Winifred could I find.

At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen y
Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the
mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning.
Afterwards I took up my abode at a fishing-inn, and here I stayed the
winter through--scarcely hoping to find her now, yet chained to
Snowdon. After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery
boulders and rugged rocks, crossing swollen torrent-beds, amid rain
and ice and snow and mist such as frightened away the Welsh
themselves--after thus wandering, because I could not leave the
region, it was a comfort to me to turn into the low, black-beamed
room of the fishing-inn, with drying hams, flitches of bacon, and
fishing-rods for decorations, and hear the simple-hearted Cymric folk
talking, sometimes in Welsh, sometimes in English, but always with
that kindness and that courtesy which go to make the poetry of Welsh
common life.

Meantime, I had, as I need scarcely say, spared neither trouble nor
expense in advertising for information about Winifred in the Welsh
and the West of England newspapers. I offered rewards for her
discovery, and the result was merely that I was pestered by letters
from people (some of them tourists of education) suggesting traces
and clues of so wild, and often of so fantastic a kind, that I
arrived at the conviction that of all man's faculties his imagination
is the most lawless, and at the same time the most powerful. It was
perfectly inconceivable to me that the writers of some of these
letters were not themselves demented, so wild or so fanciful were the
clues they suggested. Yet. when I came to meet them and talk with
them (as I sometimes did), I found these correspondents to be of the
ordinary prosaic British type. All my efforts were to no purpose.

Among my longer journeys from the fishing-inn, the most frequent were
those to Holywell, near Flint, to the Well of St. Winifred--the
reader need not be told why. He will recollect how little Winnie,
while plying me with strawberries, had sagely recommended the holy
water of this famous well as a 'cure for crutches.' She had actually
brought me some of it in a lemonade bottle when she returned to
Raxton after her first absence, and had insisted on rubbing my ankle
with it. She had, as I afterwards learnt from her father, importuned
and a