of the room in which
I am writing are five feet thick. The old part of the house
must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British
tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the
Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of
pilgrimage probably before Christianity. Stone coffins are turned
over on the hillsides in making modern improvements. Denfil Gadenis'
(the mediaeval Welsh saint's) wooden horn still stands in the church
porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more
palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows
and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me. It was Owen
Glendower's country. Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden
down the avenue. We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality,
which was always a respectable thing--far more so than the Celticism
of the Gaels and Irish. We are apt to forget that the Tudors were
Welsh." Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety
of occupation and change of scene. Disraeli's Government had just
come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon,
Froude was on intimate terms. Froude had always been interested in
the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had
become a popular scheme. As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton:

"Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies.
They are privately using their command of the situation to make the
separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means. Lord
Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada
in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought
to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was
in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not
Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks.
Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada
and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be
responsible for their own defence. That wise policy fostered union
rather than separation, by providing that the working classes at
home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow-
subjects. Lord Carnarvon himself had passed in 1867 the Bill which
federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn. He was
now anxious to carry out a similar scheme in South Africa, and
Froude offered to find out for him how the land lay. His visit wa