Crossing the Welsh Bridge at Shrewsbury, we followed, for some long way, a winding road through a country given over to farming; a country of fields, hedgerows, and growing crops, of sleepy hamlets and stray farmsteads; idyllic but unexciting. Still, there were peeps of hills and the promise of wilder things in the vague beyond to which we were bound. No amount of disappointment robs the beyond of its glamour, for the unknown unfailingly attracts, the disenchantment of to-day may be followed by the surprise of to-morrow. Yet distance is but a gay deceiver; where we may be at any moment, is not that the delectable distance to others far away? "The delusion that distance creates contiguity destroys." We kept steering a westerly course to the best of our ability, and on the whole we succeeded in doing so fairly well, trusting to arrive somehow and at some time at Aberdovey. Who has not heard of the sweet bells of Aberdovey?--I know not whether they ring sweetly still, for no bells rang for us when we were there. For many miles the scenery, though pleasant enough, was devoid of special character, but as we progressed the country grew wilder and the villages lost their indefinable English look; we had not arrived in Wales, but we were nearing the borderland. Long Mountain rose grandly to our right, clear cut as a Grecian statue against the sky, and to our left the curiously-shaped range of hills known as the Stipperstones stood prominently forth, their summits broken by huge rugged rocks, "the fragments of an earlier world," that stand boldly forth from them. According to a local legend, at times on stormy nights "Wild Edric," an ancient warrior chief, may be seen riding in the air above the Stipperstones, and when he is seen it forebodes some calamity. Give me the West Country for legends! I have heard of ghostly huntsmen with their yeth-hounds being seen there; of ghostly highwaymen; of headless horsemen who pursue lone travellers at night on lonely roads; of the ghosts of men and horses who once a year, on the anniversary of the battle of Sedgemoor, may be heard a-galloping away from that fatal field; and of the Devil himself riding across country, whose horse once cast a shoe, when the Devil called at a blacksmith's to have it re-shod, and how the blacksmith declared he caught a glimpse of his Satanic majesty's cloven foot beneath his cloak--and this within the memory of living man!