. Our friend with the hammer discourses learnedly about those long
ridges of hard rock which stand out over the Dovey Plain when, gracious
me! we look round and, will you believe it? There was a bevy of females
in a state of--shall I go on? No; but I will just say we saw them
waddling like ducks into the water. The porpoises were alarmed and
betook themselves off. And so did we. Had the bathers been black
instead of white we should have thought ourselves on the coast of Africa.
Such an Adam and Eve-ish state of things we never saw before. Well,
_honi soit qui mal y pense_."

Anyhow, thus did the six hours swiftly pass in those unregenerate days.
For Mr. Savin had yet to build his Borth hotel and lodging houses, which
to-day give welcome shelter to a very different throng of visitors,
summer after summer, attracted by the placid beauties and the
invigorating air of Cardigan Bay. It was, at worst, but a temporary
orgy, marking, as it were, a new epoch in the life of the Cambrian; whose
lengthening limbs now stretched from the Severn to the sea.

CHAPTER VI. THE BATTLE OF ELLESMERE.

"_The question of a railway is now or never_."--THE LATE MR. R. G.
JEBB, of Ellesmere.

No period, since the wild days of the "railway mania," was more pregnant
of schemes than the later months of 1860. They sprang up like mushrooms
all along the Shropshire border, and some of them, like mushrooms, as
suddenly suffered decay. A facetious Salopian prophet ventured publicly
to predict that "we shall hear next of a railway to Llansilin (a remote
village among the border hills) or the moon." His ratiocination was
hardly exaggerated. A "preliminary prospectus" was actually published
for carrying a railway, at a cost of under 10,000 pounds per mile, from
Shrewsbury, through Kinnerley and Porthywaen, thence "near Llanfyllin and
Llanrhaiadr," to Llangynog, "through the Berwyn hills" to Llandrillo, and
so to Dolgelley and Portmadoc. It was to be worked and maintained by the
West Midland, Shrewsbury and Coast of Wales Railway Co.; the prospects of
mineral and passenger traffic were "most promising," and throughout its
entire length of 90 miles, the promoters pointed out with all the
emphasis which italics can afford, "it has _only one tunnel_, and that
slightly exceeding a mile and half in length." Eventually, a line,
partly following this route, under the less comprehensive title of the
West Shropshire Mineral Railway,