pounds.

[Illustration: CAER-GAI.]

The neighborhood of Chester is as suggestive of antiquity and foreigners as
the city itself. Volumes might be written about the quaint, Dutch-like
scenery of the low rich land reclaimed from the sea; the broad, sandy
estuary of the Dee, with the square-headed peninsula, the Wirrall, which
divides this quiet river from the noisy Mersey; the Hoylake, Parkgate and
Neston fisher-folk on the sandy shores, with their queer lives, monotonous
scratching-up of mussels and cockles, a never-failing trade, their terms of
praise--"the biggest scrat," for instance, "in all the island," being the
form of commendation for the woman who can with her rake at the end of a
long pole scratch up most shellfish in a given time; the low, fertile green
pastures, the creamy cheese and the eight yearly cheese-fairs. The city
itself is the most foreign-looking in all England, and the inhabitants have
the good taste to be proud of this. The river Dee--Milton's "wizard
stream"--celebrated both by English and Welsh bards, is not seen to as much
advantage under the walls of the Roman "camp" (_castra_=Chester) as
elsewhere, but its bridges serve to supply the want of fine scenery,
especially the Old Bridge, which crosses the river just at its bend, and
whose massive pointed arches took the place, when they were first built, of
a ferry by which the city was entered at the "Ship Gate," whence now you
look over "the Cop" or high bank on the right side of the stream, and view,
as from a dike in Holland, the reclaimed land stretching eight miles beyond
Chester, though the resemblance ceases at Saltney, where behind the
iron-works tower the Welsh hills--Moel-Famman conspicuous above the
rest--that bound the Vale of Clwyd.

The Dee is more a Welsh than an English river. It rises in the bleak
mountain-region of Merionethshire, the most intensely Welsh of all
counties, above Bala Lake, which is commonly but incorrectly called its
source. Thence it flows through the Vale of Llangollen, famous in poetry,
and waters the meadows of Wynnestay, the splendid home of one of Wales's
most national representatives, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, and only beyond
that does it become English by flowing round and into Cheshire. On a very
tiny scale the Dee follows something of the course of the Rhine: three
streamlets combine to form it; these unite at the village of Llanwchllyn,
and the river flows on, a mere mountain-torrent, past an old far