ern one
probably rising to the altitude of nine hundred feet. On the southern
side of this pass near the entrance were neat dwellings for the
accommodation of visitors with cool apartments on the ground floor, with
large windows, looking towards the precipitous side of the mighty
northern hill; within them I observed tables, and books, and young men,
probably English collegians, seated at study.

After I had proceeded some way up the pass, down which a small river ran,
a woman who was standing on the right-hand side of the way, seemingly on
the look-out, begged me in broken English to step aside and look at the
fall.

"You mean a waterfall, I suppose?" said I.

"Yes, sir."

"And how do you call it?" said I.

"The Fall of the Swallow, sir."

"And in Welsh?" said I.

"Rhaiadr y Wennol, sir."

"And what is the name of the river?" said I.

"We call the river the Lygwy, sir."

I told the woman I would go, whereupon she conducted me through a gate on
the right-hand side and down a path overhung with trees to a rock
projecting into the river. The Fall of the Swallow is not a majestic
single fall, but a succession of small ones. First there are a number of
little foaming torrents, bursting through rocks about twenty yards above
the promontory on which I stood. Then come two beautiful rolls of white
water, dashing into a pool a little way above the promontory; then there
is a swirl of water round its corner into a pool below on its right,
black as death, and seemingly of great depth; then a rush through a very
narrow outlet into another pool, from which the water clamours away down
the glen. Such is the Rhaiadr y Wennol, or Swallow Fall; called so from
the rapidity with which the waters rush and skip along.

On asking the woman on whose property the fall was, she informed me that
it was on the property of the Gwedir family. The name of Gwedir brought
to my mind the "History of the Gwedir Family," a rare and curious book
which I had read in my boyhood, and which was written by the
representative of that family, a certain Sir John Wynne, about the
beginning of the seventeenth century. It gives an account of the
fortunes of the family, from its earliest rise; but more particularly
after it had emigrated, in order to avoid bad neighbours, from a fair and
fertile district into rugged Snowdonia, where it found anything but the
repose it came in quest of. The book which is written in bold graphic
English, flings