Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
When, in course of time, the Syndicate first heard from Terry (who heard
it goodness knows where) that "glo" was the Welsh word for "coal," it
was on the point of plumping for coal without further question.
"What more do you want?" it asked itself. "'Glo'--'coal'; there you are.
Place-name. Awful lot in a genuine place-name. Find it on an old map, to
show that we didn't invent it, and the whole thing settles itself.
There's bound to _be_ coal. Sure to be. They didn't call it that for
nothing. All ground's got _some_thing in it. _I_ say coal. On the face
of it. It seems to me Providential. (Shut up, Abercelyn; we're talking
about Llanyglo now.) ... Who says coal, then?" ...
But Llanyglo was not destined to be a colliery village. Latticed
shaft-heads were not to rise under the Trwyn, nor men to descend in
cages to the galleries deep under the sandhills. Edward Garden's house
was not to become a mine-manager's residence, nor a coal-quay to be
constructed where the wooden jetty stuck out like a stumpy thumb into
the sea.--Nevertheless, it almost looked at one time as if it might have
been so.
The Syndicate's registered offices were within a hundred yards of Lime
Street Station, and Terry, looking forth from an upper window, could see
the august portico of St. George's Hall and the cabs and steam-trams
running to and fro past it. He sat day by day at a high sloping desk,
perched on a tall stool. A small pile of letters lay by his side,
weighted with a surveyor's reel-tape, and on a shelf above the press
with the dumb-bell arm, thrust among directories and files, were _Stones
of Venice_ and _The Christian Year_. There was a green cardboard shade
on the double-elbowed gas-bracket, and on the wall near it hung an
ebony-edged T-square and a number of French curves. There was a second
stool for callers, and in a small outer office a youth of sixteen read
_The Boys of London and New York_ and chewed root-liquorice. The place
was shabby, as befitted a hole-in-corner enterprise, but Terry saw not
that shabbiness. He had splendour enough in his own visions. He did not
look very busy, but he was. A dozen inspired and half-baked schemes
fermented in his head, and besides these, he was minding Llanyglo--the
thyme and wild pansies and butterflies of its sandhills, the glaucous
blue sea-holly of its shore, its heathery Trwyn, its coal or what-not
underfoot, and its crystal air overhead--especially its crystal air
overhead....
IV
"DIM SAESNEG"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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