ight, thickens the lower sky, and
lies heavily over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper blue clear and
the head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady
ray of the evening star. The people scattered about are not mining
people, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottages
are rather cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates
have taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upon
their edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure
to see. How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more
than half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--with which
the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better,
simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine
and the bright grey of an English sky.

The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it is
modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
brothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists of
yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old
world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the
excursionists.

With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work
upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-
farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging
the washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine which
slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is
guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the
obscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-conscious
remorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make
doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on
monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got among
the cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from other
valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth.

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at
them without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girl
that you heard the brutal word of co