Once, in that cold remote age, the sea, a red sea, swept from the mouth of the Dee over Cheshire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, to the estuary of the Severn. Wales was a great mountainous island with glaciers rolling down the valleys, discharging their mighty rivers of ice into it. The Wrekin stood up above the waters, and the waves leaped about it. The great rollers from the north plunged and shivered into foam against Wenlock Edge. The swirls formed the pools that are now still basins full of carp around Ellesmere; it deposited its salt in the beds whence the brine is pumped at Droitwich and in Cheshire. Rafts of ice broken off from the glacier, descending the valleys of the Dee, the Severn, and the Wye, drifted about till they melted, tilted, and discharged their burdens of stone, brought from the Welsh mountains, over the sea bed, so that now these are found strewn around Birmingham and Bromley, scattered over the Clent and Lickey Hills. Snowdon, unhappily, is fond of wearing his cloud-cap, that Tarn-Kappe of Northern mythology which was supposed to make him invisible who donned it. In the _Niebelungen Lied_, one of the four greatest epic poems the world has produced, when Gunther, the Burgundian king, goes to court, Brunehild of Iceland, the virago, informs him she will have none but such as can overmaster her in hurling and in leaping. Siegfried dons the mist-cap, and puts his hand behind that of Gunther to assist him in casting the spear and pitching the stone, and he takes him in his arms to leap, and so wins the bride for Gunther. And dear old Snowdon with his mist-cap on has baffled the forces of Norman and English again and again as he hugged to his heart the gallant but outnumbered Welsh. It was not the rugged heights or the impenetrable ravines alone that bewildered and held back the invader, but the cap of cloud which Snowdon drew over the refugees who clung to him for safety. Standing forward, and looking over the western sea, Snowdon attracts the vapours, and they are fortunate who, ascending it, can see from its summit the glorious panorama of tossed mountain ridges and jewelled lakes surrounding it. [Illustration: LLANBERIS] And now a few words relative to those places whence the visitor to Snowdon will explore this beautiful neighbourhood. Llanberis, much given over to slate quarrying, takes its name from a certain Peris, “Cardinal of Rome,” of whom scarcely anything but the name is known, not even his pedigree,[2] and that means a great deal, or rather did so, till the Normans came into Wales and upset the ecclesiastical order there.