Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the
door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off
in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them,
men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them.
Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse.
This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles
overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small
squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches
knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss
Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of
glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back,
and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss
Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side
of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes
both of school and Chapel was heated.
Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary
and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the
Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!
"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby
man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even
finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through
them! And that iss not a roof--it iss only rick-covers----"
"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed
Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face
could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave
it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the
money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went.
Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of
bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith
College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.
Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now
affected to take a jocular view of the matter.
"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make
trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently--I think I start a Limited
Company----"
But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly
than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision
of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr
anxiously watched the tap.--"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he
said grimly.
"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in,
the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the
Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day--it
set a s'ock-king example, whatever."
"And they call it 'ano-ther cup of tea,'" said a third.
"They very smart ones----"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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