They gained the Dinas, where already the fire was yellow and crackling, and stood smiling Good evenings, as if they waited to be asked inside. How long ago it was since the foundations of that Dinas had been sprinkled with the blood of Merlin--how long ago it was since the Red and White Dragons had contended about it, now one gaining the advantage, now the other--how long ago these things had been, not even Miss Amy Topham would have dared to ask June Lacey. Now it resembled a grey old heel of cheese, with a little scrabbling in one corner. This scrabbling was where Bert Stoy, one of the younger and most indefatigable of the Readers, had hoped he might find a British grave. "We thought you'd maybe changed your minds about coming," were the words with which Barry Topham welcomed them. He was an Indian, but a bearded one, and he bustled here and there, wanting to know where So-and-So was, and whether this requisite or that had been brought up, and seeing to this and the other. The goblin shadows of eighteen or twenty of the Readers danced on the ruined works, and the sky behind their illumined faces was of a sad and leaden lavender hue. The lanterns made little patches in the short grass; matches lighted faces momentarily; and then suddenly there broke out over the shoulder of the headland and continued thenceforward, the Light. Red, red, white--red, red, white--it was numbing, intolerable. It dyed the clouds that seemed to sag over the earth as the ceiling-sheets sagged in the cottages, and its glare was not lost high overhead now, as it had been on that night when the Kerrs had rested for their "nooning" in the midst of their building of their Hafod. The staggering blaze passed not twenty feet above them, seeming to stumble and trip over the cloud-folds, and driving the revellers to fresh places with their backs to it. You would have said that those ancient Red and White Dragons had come to life again and were chasing one another across the rafters of the night. Then Barry Topham, placing himself by a jagged tooth of rock, held up his hand for silence. He had motioned Howell Gruffydd to his side, and had pointed at somebody's cap. His fingers tweaked a tuning-fork; he set the vibrating prong against his teeth; he gave them a soft note--"Doh----" and then: "_When wilt Thou save the people, O God of Mercy, when?..._" Then when it was finished, Barry again stood with uplifted hand. Caps were put on again by such as wore them. "Not weft enough," was Barry's brief comment on the singing; the Welsh, unfamiliar with the air, had not sung. "Never mind; it might ha' been worse.--Now I'm just going to say a few words, and then we'll make a start." And he began.