h a light heart. Whether he sat in his office or in the cosy corner
of some favourite rural inn the muse burned brightly within him, and,
from his remote retreat among the hills which look down on the infant
Severn, he poured out his soul in poetry, which ranks high in Celtic
literature. Welsh verse always suffers in translation into the more
cumbrous English, but there are many who have known the charm even of an
Anglicised version of "Myvanwy Vychan," and when he died, in 1887, he was
acclaimed by such an authority as the Rev. H. Elvet Lewis, to be "one of
the best lyrical poets of Wales," who had "rendered excellent service to
the national melodies of 'Cymru Fu' by writing words congenial to their
spirit,--a work which Robert Burns did for Scottish melodies." He was
buried in Llanwnog churchyard, where a simple plate marks his resting
place, and friends and neighbours who attended the funeral service on the
following Sunday did not feel that it was out of place that it should
have been based on the text "Know ye not that there is . . . a great man
fallen this day." They did know it, humble as his station might be; and
more than one of his admirers has since visited the little deserted
office where he worked on the Van line and ransacked its drawers and
cupboards for hidden gems of poesy he might have left behind him. Alas!
nothing more inspiring was ever found there than faded way-bills and torn
invoices! But who shall say that there is no romance clinging close
around even the humblest, and now the most woe-begone, of all the little
offshoots of the Cambrian?

CHAPTER IX. CONSOLIDATION.

"_Facility of communication begets_ '_community of interests_,'
_which is the only treaty that is not a_ '_scrap of paper_.'"--

THE LATE LORD FISHER.

Lord John Russell, it is said, used, in conversation with Queen Victoria,
to date all political development from the Revolution of 1688. If those
mystic figures signalize the birthday of Whiggery, in the political
world, in much the same way we may date the constitution of the Cambrian,
as we know it to-day, from the year 1864. In more than one way it was a
notable period in Welsh railway annals. The various independent links in
the chain were either completed and wholly or partially in working order,
or in course of construction. Thanks to the influential efforts of the
Earl of Powis, arrangements had been made with the Post Office and the
London an