But if a bell you overthrow,
Sixpence is due before you go;
But if you either swear or curse,
Twelvepence is due; pull out your purse.
Our laws are old, they are not new;
Therefore the clerk must have his due.
If to our laws you do consent,
Then take a bell: we are content.

[Illustration: LLANGOLLEN.]

Farndon Bridge and Wrexham Church (the latter looks like a small cathedral
to the unpractised eye) are the last Welsh points of attraction before the
Dee becomes quite an English river. Malpas (_mauvais pas_ = "bad step"), on
the English bank, is significantly so-called from its situation as a border
town: the rector, too, might consider it not ill named, as regards the odd
partition of the church tithes, which has been in force from time
immemorial, and has given rise to an explanatory legend concerning a
travelling king whom the resident curate wisely entertained in the absence
of the rector, receiving for his guerdon a promise of an equal share in the
income, not only for himself, but for all future curates. In the upper
rectory (the lower is the curate's house) was born Bishop Heber in 1783,
and in the early years of this century, before missionary meetings were as
common as they are now, the young clergyman wrote on the spur of the
moment, with only one word corrected, the well-known hymn, "From
Greenland's Icy Mountains." A missionary sermon was announced for Sunday at
Wrexham, the vicarage of Heber's father-in-law, Shirley, and the want of a
suitable hymn was felt. He was asked on Saturday to write one, and did so,
seated at a window of the old vicarage-house. It was printed that evening,
and sung the next day in Wrexham Church. The original manuscript is in a
collection at Liverpool, and the printer who set up the type when a boy was
still living at Wrexham within the last twenty years.

[Illustration: CHESTER, FROM THE ALDFORD ROAD.]

The river now makes a turn, sweeping along into English ground and making
almost a natural moat round Chester, the great Roman camp whose form and
intersecting streets still bear the stamp of Roman regularity, and whose
history long bore traces of the influence of Roman inflexibility mingled
with British dash. The view of the city is fine from the Aldford road (or
Old Ford, where a Roman pavement is sometimes visible in the bed of the
stream), with the cathedral and St. John's towering over the peaks and
gables that shoot up above the walls. T