HAVING travelled together a few miles further into the mountain, Twm expressed his wonder at seeing the turf-cutters and haymakers following their avocations almost side by side in this wild district. “Well,” cried he, “I know that much has been said, sung, and written, in praise of mountain scenery; and where ’tis truly romantic as well as wild, I am a great lover of it myself; but this before us is my aversion. Here no sound salutes the ear but the lonely cry of a few melancholy kites, hungry enough to prey upon one another; and no objects strike the eye but the flat tame desert, and a few wretched cottages thinly scattered over this desolate region, whose inhabitants are miserably employed in scooping peat from the marsh for their fires, or cutting their bald thin crop of hay from the uninclosed mountain—_the gwair rhos cwtta_, or moor hay, which, dispensing with the incumbrance of a cart or sledge, the women carry home in their aprons, as the winter maintenance of a half-starved cow. Even the shepherds and their flocks are wise enough to keep from this gloomy seat of starvation; but the dull plodding turf-cutters are numerous enough. To me there is nothing that associates more with squalid poverty than turf fires: the crackling faggot and the Christmas log, have their rustic characteristics; coal has its proud and solid warmth; the clay-and-culm fires of Cardigan and Pembrokeshire, formed of balls, and fantastically arranged by the industrious hands of fair maidens, are bright and durable, revealing the gay faces of the cheerful semicircular group—and above all, the smokeless cleanly stone coal: but turf, smoky, ill-savored, ash creating, dusty turf—recals the marsh and moor, rain-loaded skies, and fern-thatched cottages, whose battered roofs swept by the blast, discover the rotten rafters grinning like the bare ribs of poverty; and worse than all, the joyless faces of the toil-bowed children of the desert. I heartily agree with the sentiment of the old Pennill {152a} “How gay seems the valley with rich waving wheat, Fair lands and fair houses, with shelters so neat; While the whole feather’d choir to delight us conspires, There’s nought on the mountain but turf and turf fires.” “And let me add,” cried Twm, with vivacity, “as indicative of my own taste on the subject, a Triban {152b} of my own composition.— Three things—to my mind each with loveliness teems: A vale between mountains that’s threaded by streams; A neat white-wall’d cottage mid gardens and trees; And a young married pair that appreciate these.”