Also, of course, thousands of trippers visited the great bridges. But the interior was, and is, wholly uninteresting, and the fine sea-coast was at that time almost inaccessible by land, and had no accommodation for summer visitors. The roads, except the great London and Holyhead road, were generally atrocious, and there were only three or four places where a carriage could be hired. Trees, even hedges, were rare, and there was no shelter from the frequent gales. Marshes and moorland divided villages apparently connected. Who could ask a child to go to school across a mile of wind-swept “morfa” or “rhos”? I was told the current, and recurrent, anecdote of the Tutor of Jesus College, the Welsh College of Oxford. Jones, of Jesus, asked how it was that Tacitus spoke of Anglesey as “insula umbrosa,”[3] whereas nowadays there is hardly a tree to be seen inland. And the Tutor replied deprecatingly, “Well, you know, Mr. Jones, it’s rather a _shady_ island still.” Also William Williams, Ysgol-feistr, had said that in most parishes there was “not a stick in the place except the parson.” The inhabitants of this _terra incognita_ were themselves incognitiores; for even the travellers who knew the railway and the coastline had no dealings with the people. In those days Anglesey was almost wholly ignorant of English. Our dealings lay, of course, chiefly with the clergy and the parish overseers; but the latter usually brought their own ministers and elders to support them. Then the proceedings raged lengthily in the vernacular: my chief, or his assistant, conducted the enquiries: “Druidaeque circum, preces diras sublatis ad caelum manibus fundentes” (as Tacitus said of their ancestors) denounced the Catechism, while I looked on and yawned. Thanks to the freehold tenure of Church Benefices, the island was in the hands of the Chapel. There were practically only two Dissenting bodies in Anglesey; the Calvinistic Methodists and the Congregationalists. The Wesleyans locally were a small body. The Calvinists, like the Wesleyans, were an offshoot from the Church, forced out by the folly of its rulers. They held all the vital doctrines of the Church, and, even now, could accept the Thirty-nine Articles and the Liturgy as freely and with the same mental reservations as an orthodox Low Churchman. An intelligent Calvinist told me that “Calvinistic” had ceased to be anything but an _epitheton ornans_: but that may have been merely his own position. I imagine there is no difference in doctrine between the Calvinists, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Wesleyans; but their views on Church government vary.