PART ONE I THE YEAR DOT On a Friday afternoon in the June of the year 1880, a roomy old shandrydan, midway between a trap and a wagonette, moved slowly along the Porth Neigr and Llanyglo road. It had been built as a pair-horse vehicle for Squire Wynne, of Plas Neigr, but the door at the back of it now bore the words, "Royal Hotel, Porth Neigr," and its present or some intermediate owner had converted it to the use of a single horse. The shaky-kneed old brown animal at present between the shafts might have had a spirit-level inside him, so unerringly did he become aware when the road departed by as much as a fraction from the true horizontal. Taking the good with the bad, he was doing a fair five miles an hour. At each of its revolutions the off hind-wheel gave a dry squeak like a pair of boots that has not been paid for. The day was warm, and hay was cutting. Combings of hay striped the hedges where the carts had passed, and as the Royal Hotel conveyance was so wide that it had to draw in in order to allow anything else to pass it, wisps had lodged also in the cords of the great pile of boxes and brown tin trunks that occupied the forward part of it. Honeysuckle tangled the hedge-tops; the wild roses were out below; and in the ditches the paler scabious was of the colour of the sky, the deeper that of the mountains towards which the old horse lazily clop-clopped. The pile of trunks in front hid the driver and the two print-skirted and black-jacketed young women who sat beside him from those inside the vehicle. These two young women were two of Mrs. Garden's domestics, and they travelled far more comfortably than did their mistress. Packed up by her bustle behind, on her right by her seven-years-old daughter who slept with her head on her shoulders, on her left by the angle of the trap, and in front by the hamper, the three or four straw basses, the cardboard boxes, the hold-all of sticks and umbrellas, with a travelling-rug thrown in (all of which articles she strove to balance on her short, steep lap), she could only perspire. Her husband, who sat opposite, could see no more of her than the top of her hen's-tail, lavender bonnet. Even this he shut out when he took up, now his newspaper (every line of which he had read twice), and now his daughter's _Little Folks_ (for the inspection of which periodical, though the print was much bigger than that of the newspaper, he put on his gold-rimmed glasses). The smell of his excellent cigar mingled with the scents of the roses and hay, and trailed like an invisible wake a hundred yards behind.