Cylchgronau Cymru

again our host was most interesting. For ex- ample, a relic of the Commendatio Animarum is hidden in the private prayers at the house before the body is removed for the public office, and cake and wine are distributed to everybody present before the funeral procession starts on its way. There were native Welsh-speaking people in the Forest fifty years ago, and the marten cat and the raven still breed in the hills and woods around that merge into the bold Kerry range. Half-way back to our quarters we cast into the Buffalo at Clun for tea, curiosity to see what the inside of a Buffalo was like being really the idea uppermost. We have been inside a good many Lions in our time, a Boar or two, a couple or more Black Bulls, a Talbot dog, and not a few Dragons, red, green, and yellow, with a Griffin thrown in, but never before had we sought the hospitality of a Buffalo. So we took our dish of tea there, and the reader, we are sure, will be happy to learn that we had no reason to rue that plunge into the unknown. In writing upon the district one is reminded of that fascinating novel upon Shropshire peasant life, Precious Bane," which tells of the people of that countryside of four or five generations ago and of their superstitions and customs. Let us whet the reader's curiosity with some of the chief characters and so send him to the book itself, for it is greatly out of the common run and no library upon Wales and the Marches is complete without it. First, then, is Gideon Sarn, sin-eater for his father and strong man (" which is almost the same as to say a man with little time for kind- ness "), who lived up to his own hard ideals and paid the price. Then we have Prudence (Prue), his sister, with the hare-shotten lip and so under the ban of witch-craft," dear Prue, with the purity of heart and soul and the sweet lovable- ness of a saint, who all-unknowing won her man. Beguildy next, the wizard, who was only a lazy old fraud. After him, Jancis, his feckless daughter, whom Sarn shouldn't have to wife, for hadn't the old rascal willed it otherwise? Then Misses Beguildy, who more than half suspected Beguildy for a humbug, but didn't quite dare to say so, and after her, Felena, wife of the tongue- tied shepherd from the blue and purple moun- tains," the tawny-skinned and black haired temptress with the green eyes and the green beads. So follow Grimble the mean and twisty," Huglet the bully, empty-headed Tivvy, and Grandfeyther Callard. And lastly comes Kester the weaver, Prue's own true man, fine wrostler with a deal of booklarning," who stopped the bull-baiting at Lullingford fair, and who couldna abide politics, for they were all lies and he'd sooner keep clear." There they are, these simple country folk, with their human virtues and their human shortcomings, drawn with such craft and skill in that book of Mary Webb's on this out-of-the-way corner of Wales on and about the Dyke in the early years of the past century. Space will not permit to tell at any length of the things we saw and did on the last days of the holiday of the privilege of a visit to an old vicarage garden with its century-old hedge of yew of our walk with a fellow-countryman, master at the county school, who took us to see the Bury Ditches (the largest example of an Iron Age camp in the kingdom), with the village of Brockton below where Llywelyn Fawr patched up a treaty of peace in the year 1234 with Henry III. over troubles hereabouts of the school sports of the amusing traps we laid to find who with a Welsh name would admit Welsh blood and who not of the excellent Hereford cattle everywhere, and Kerry Hill, Welsh Moun- tain, and Clun Forest sheep, the last the descend- ants of the old horned and speckle and black- faced breeds of the Forest and the Longmynd with a strain of the Shropshire of seventy years ago in them, now with a herd book of their own and saved just in time from extinction, and with a distinctly useful future ahead of the encourag- ing amount of land under the plough of the splendid work the Forestry Commission is doing all over the district of pretty little black-and- white Church Stretton and Little Stretton of stately old Shrewsbury town that for better or for worse (it is for herself to say which) is outside the bounds of this ancient dominion of Wales of the talk we overheard about the wrathful in- dignation of the kind lady of Leicester over the delay by the motor bus people in delivering her present to Mrs Jones, Bishop's Castle, Shrop- shire," and of the bus driver's sound, valid and unanswerable reasons for that delay and of our walk into Churchstoke over the border with significantly Welsh farm names, such as Pentre, Cwm Cae, Pentre Cwm, Rolva, and Pentre Willey on the hill on our left, and English Snead, Upper Snead, Broadway, and Hoarstone in the valley. But the reader will have seen enough, we hope, to agree that the ramble in Clunesland was well worth while. BOOKS RECEIVED Plant y Goedwig," by Myra Evans. Price 1/6. Foyles. Snowdonia," by J. Cuming Walters, M.A. Foyles. Divorce as I see it," H. G. Wells and others. 3/6 cloth. Noel Douglas.