Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
grey, darkish and rather delicate-looking, and only half the size of his
stout, blonde wife. As long as Free Trade remained untouched, he had no
politics, and he was an adherent of the lower forms of the Established
Church. He was taking this journey on his daughter Minetta's account,
who was not doing so well as she ought to be. He had bought a couple of
the Llanyglo cottages, and judged that by this time they must be ready
for occupation.
The mountains drew nearer, and other pale colours began to show through
the scabious blue. The pile of luggage continued to brush the hedges,
and the off wheel to creak. Minetta snored lightly as she slept, and the
black legs that issued from her pink check frock, trimmed with crimson
braid, swung slackly with every jolt of the cart. Mrs. Garden's face
glistened; Mr. Garden allowed _Little Folks_ to fall from his hand, and
dozed; John Willie sought birds' nests and rabbits; and the old horse
continued to change from lumpish trot to slow walk and from slow walk to
lumpish trot, as if he had had a spirit-level inside him.
After this fashion the Gardens jogged along the lanes where to-day the
summer dust never settles for touring-cars, motor-cycles and the
Llanyglo motor chars-à-bancs.
"John Willie!"
It was five o'clock, and they had arrived. Leaving the cluster of three
or four farms that formed the land-ward part of Llanyglo, they had
turned through a gateless gap in a thymy earth-wall, and all save Mrs.
Garden and Minetta had descended. The cart-track had become less and
less distinct, and had finally lost itself altogether in deep, sandy
drifts in which their approach made no noise. There was a fresher feel
in the air.
And then, through a V in the sandhills, the sea had appeared, and the
lazy crash of a breaker had been heard.
The irregular row of thatched cottages was set perhaps a hundred yards
back from high-water mark, and the intervening space was a waste of
sand, coarse tussocks, and the glaucous blue sea-holly. Half-overblown
rubbish strewed the beach--rusty tin pans and kettles, old kedge
anchors, corks, a mass of potato-parings in which three or four hens
scratched, and the skeletons of a couple of disused boats. The
half-dozen serviceable boats were gathered a couple of hundred yards
away about a short wooden jetty. A mile away in the other direction rose
the Trwyn, bronze with sunny heather and purple with airy shadow, with
the lighthouse and the Dinas on the top. A small herd of black cattle
had wandered slowly out to it, and was wandering slowly back again at
the edge of the tide.
"John Willie!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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