It is the commonest air you will hear in Wales--_Land of my Fathers_. Quarrymen sing it as they work by their trucks, slate-splitters whistle it as they tap in their wedges, farmers' lads tss-tss it between their teeth as they clump along the road, sitting sideways on their horses. You would think it had died an age ago of familiarity and repetition. Had it been _God Save the King_, played at an English theatre, there would have been a single line of it, half lost in the reaching for shawls and cloaks and fans, and here and there a man would have stood with an interval of an inch between his hat and his head, and already the attendants would have been getting out the sheeting for the stalls--so long is it since we knew adversity. But here, it needed but a stake driven into a foreshore that would hardly have pastured a donkey, and that was enough--so much adversity have they seen.... Then, as John Willie craned his neck, a man moved from in front of the candle among the geraniums, and Dafydd Dafis's hands could be seen. They seemed not so much hands as multiple things, assemblies of members each one of which was possessed of an independent life and will. There was not a finger that did not lurk, stiffen, clutch, and then start back from the throbbing string as if each note had been a poignant deed done, an old and secret vow redeemed. For the images that were evoked were cruel images. Those fingers of Dafydd's might have been choosing, not among strings of wire and gut, but among the living nerves of an enemy whose moans of suffering were transmuted into music. Know, that this--not the languid wrist nor the caressing hand, not the swans-neck forearm nor the coquetry of the foot on the pedal--not these, but the hook, the claw, the distortion, and the wreaking and the more than human and yet somehow less than human love--this is the harping of Wales.... "_Gwlad! Gwlad!_----" Dafydd's head against the Post Office notice did not move, but his twisted hand might have wrenched the sinews from their shoulder-blade of a frame---- "_Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad!_----" He did not sing the words, but the words that sang themselves in the ear of every man there meant that he was so enwrapped in his country that an alien stake in her soil was a stake in his heart also.... Within a week of that harping of _Hen Wlad_, Terry Armfield had more to mind than he had ever reckoned for.