Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
There are rocks high above Pen-Morfa; they are the same that hang over
Tre-Madoc, but near Pen-Morfa they sweep away, and are lost in the
plain. Every where they are beautiful. The great sharp ledges which
would otherwise look hard and cold, are adorned with the
brightest-colored moss, and the golden lichen. Close to, you see the
scarlet leaves of the crane's-bill, and the tufts of purple heather,
which fill up every cleft and cranny; but in the distance you see only
the general effect of infinite richness of color, broken here and there
by great masses of ivy. At the foot of these rocks come a rich verdant
meadow or two; and then you are at Pen-Morfa. The village well is sharp
down under the rocks. There are one or two large, sloping pieces of
stone in that last field, on the road leading to the well, which are
always slippery; slippery in the summer's heat, almost as much as in the
frost of winter, when some little glassy stream that runs over them is
turned into a thin sheet of ice. Many, many years back--a lifetime
ago--there lived in Pen-Morfa a widow and her daughter. Very little is
required in those out-of-the-way Welsh villages. The wants of the people
are very simple. Shelter, fire, a little oat-cake and buttermilk, and
garden produce; perhaps some pork and bacon from the pig in winter;
clothing, which is principally of home manufacture, and of the most
enduring kind: these take very little money to purchase, especially in a
district into which the large capitalists have not yet come, to buy up
two or three acres of the peasants; and nearly every man about Pen-Morfa
owned, at the time of which I speak, his dwelling and some land besides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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