When Rhys had finished reading his ballad, Twm riveted his eyes on the ruins of Maes-y-velin, the two hills, the banks of the Teivy, and scenes now subordinate to the modern grandeur of the new college at Lampeter: and still remaining silent, seemed, by the force of his imagination, to bring before his eyes the whole action of this domestic tragedy. Rhys assured him that all the particulars of the murder, as narrated in the ballad, were well authenticated, both by the evidence of the unhappy young lady herself, and that of a countryman who beheld the murderers bearing the body by night, and who distinctly saw, as the moon shone upon them while in the act of casting their burthen into the river, the shining spurs of the murdered youth, projecting from the end of the sack which contained his body. But in so disordered a state was the country at the time, from the civil wars between the king and the parliament, that no cognizance was taken of the atrocious circumstance. The cursing of Maes-y-velin, and the perpetrators of the bloody deed, by the youth’s father, he said was no fiction; it was set forth in a pathetic and nervous poem, in his volume of Divine Carols, entitled “Canwyll y Cymry, or the Welshman’s Candle,” one of the most popular books ever published in the Welsh language. With this explanation they both rose from their stony seats, and pursued their way to Llandovery. CHAP. XIX. A discourse on mountains. Turf-cutters, and Moor haymakers. Twm rescues the lady of Ystrad Ffîn, and captures a highwayman, whom he brings in triumph to Llandovery.