llustration: VIEW FROM MOSTYN HOUSE, THE AUTHOR'S BIRTHPLACE,
PARKGATE, CHESHIRE]

While I was still quite a small boy, a terrible blizzard struck the
estuary while the boats were out, and for twenty-four hours one of the
fishing craft was missing. Only a lad of sixteen was in charge of
her--a boy whom we knew, and with whom we had often sailed. All my
family were away from home at the time except myself; and I can still
remember the thrill I experienced when, as representative of the "Big
House," I was taken to see the poor lad, who had been brought home at
last, frozen to death.

The men of the opposite shores were shopkeepers and miners. Somehow we
knew that they couldn't help it. The nursery rhyme about "Taffy was a
Welshman; Taffy was a thief," because familiar, had not led us to hold
any unduly inflated estimate of the Welsh character. One of my old
nurses did much to redeem it, however. She had undertaken the burden
of my brother and myself during a long vacation, and carried us off
bodily to her home in Wales. Her clean little cottage stood by the
side of a road leading to the village school of the State Mining
District of Festiniog. We soon learned that the local boys resented
the intrusion of the two English lads, and they so frequently chased
us off the village green, which was the only playground offered us,
that we at last decided to give battle. We had stored up a pile of
slates behind our garden wall, and luring the enemy to the gates by
the simple method of retiring before their advance, we saluted them
with artillery fire from a comparatively safe entrenchment. To my
horror, one of the first missiles struck a medium-sized boy right over
the eye, and I saw the blood flow instantly. The awful comparison of
David and Goliath flashed across my terror-stricken mind, and I fled
incontinently to my nurse's protection. Subsequently by her adroit
diplomacy, we were not only delivered from justice, but gained the
freedom of the green as well.

Far away up the river came the great salt-water marshes which seemed
so endless to our tiny selves. There was also the Great Cop, an
embankment miles long, intended to reach "from England to Wales," but
which was never finished because the quicksand swallowed up all that
the workmen could pour into it. Many a time I have stood on the broken
end, where the discouraged labourers had left their very shovels and
picks and trucks and had apparently fled in dismay, as if co