he conversation, because there is little English spoken at
the Pandy however good the ale."

John Jones said he wanted no ale--and attacking the bread and butter
speedily made an end of it; by the time he had done the storm was over,
and getting up I gave the child twopence, and left the cottage with
Jones. We proceeded some way farther up the valley, till we came to a
place where the ground descended a little. Here Jones touching me on the
shoulder pointed across the stream. Following with my eye the direction
of his finger, I saw two or three small sheds with a number of small
reddish blocks in regular piles beneath them. Several trees felled from
the side of the torrent were lying near, some of them stripped of their
arms and bark. A small tree formed a bridge across the brook to the
sheds.

"It is there," said John Jones, "that the husband of the woman with whom
we have been speaking works, felling trees from the alder swamp and
cutting them up into blocks. I see there is no work going on at present
or we would go over--the woman told me that her husband was at
Llangollen."

"What a strange place to come to work at," said I, "out of crowded
England. Here is nothing to be heard but the murmuring of waters and the
rushing of wind down the gulleys. If the man's head is not full of
poetical fancies, which I suppose it is not, as in that case he would be
unfit for any useful employment, I don't wonder at his occasionally going
to the public-house."

After going a little further up the glen and observing nothing more
remarkable than we had seen already, we turned back. Being overtaken by
another violent shower just as we reached the Pandy I thought that we
could do no better than shelter ourselves within the public-house, and
taste the ale, which the wife of the clog-maker had praised. We entered
the little hostelry which was one of two or three shabby-looking houses,
standing in contact, close by the Ceiriog. In a kind of little back
room, lighted by a good fire and a window which looked up the Ceiriog
valley, we found the landlady, a gentlewoman with a wooden leg, who on
perceiving me got up from a chair, and made me the best curtsey that I
ever saw made by a female with such a substitute for a leg of flesh and
bone. There were three men, sitting with jugs of ale near them on a
table by the fire, two were seated on a bench by the wall, and the other
on a settle with a high back, which ran from the wall j