ws of Bow Street, to
the civilisation of Aberystwith. For Aberystwith was our Capua, and used
to draw large parties on many a blank afternoon for marketing or
amusement.

Then there was the beach, four miles of it, from the rocks of Borth Head,
where the waves could be watched breaking on the seaweed-covered reef,
and sending up columns of white spray against the black face of the
cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the Dovey's mouth, and the
reaches of wet sands where we noted on summer days "the landscape winking
through the heat," almost with the effect of a mirage. These sands, firm
and sound under foot, were a famous walking-ground at all times; but they
changed their character very much with the seasons; at one time
retreating and laying bare a beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at
another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former state of
the shore a suggestive phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark
there appeared certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for
rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged
pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood
can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the
tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it,
perhaps, the suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost
Lowland Hundred. Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a
flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are
now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they
creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in
the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must
once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not
indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a
little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule
the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain
it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. And
perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on
the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this
prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during
the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in
a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge
of Borth and