Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The promise that Howell Gruffydd had made behind his hand to John
Pritchard had already begun to be redeemed. The Town Hall was not three
months old before a Grand Bazaar was held there in aid of the Llanyglo
Joint Chapels. On the first of the four days during which the Bazaar
lasted the proceedings were opened by Tudor Williams, Esquire, M.P. On
the second day they were opened by Edward Garden, Esquire. On the third
Mrs. Howell Gruffydd opened them, in heliotrope satin; and on the fourth
day Raymond Briggs, Esquire, who scented Chapel-building in the air,
performed the ceremony. Raymond guessed that at least three new Chapels
were certain presently to go up in the stead of those buildings of tin
and boards and sickly blue paint that had so outraged Terry Armfield's
Oxford Movement susceptibilities. As a matter of fact, five went up, and
have debts on them to this day, in spite of the long series of Bazaars,
two a season at least, at which the Saxon veins were opened.... For the
money poured in. It rained into the square collecting-sheets that were
placed at intervals along all the principal streets. It clattered into
the slots of the wooden boxes that were rattled under the nose of the
passer-by. It was minted in the Bran Tubs from which, paying your
threepence, you drew forth a penny toy. It multiplied with every flower
Miss Nancy Pritchard, with twenty other young women in Welsh national
costume, sold. It made heavy the pockets of the stall-holders, who had
never any change. It made little cylinders of silver and copper, three
and four and five inches high, on the tables folk had to pass before
they were admitted to the Concerts.... Believe it, the Chapel-goers of
Llanyglo, seeing all that money to be had for little more than the
asking, opened their eyes, and sat up, and took notice. If _this_ was
the Saxon invasion, why had they not welcomed it long ago? A few bales
of hired bunting, a few pounds for evergreens and velvet banners with
texts on them, a few paid assistants and a not unreasonable printers'
bill, and--_these_ splendid results!
As big as John Pritchard himself said, putting on his spectacles to see
whether the astonishing total could really be true, "They must be very
rit-ss, whatever!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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