And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.
More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday--that
was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
James, were reconciled--and this John Williams, without money or credit,
could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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