Beyond this sometime inn the road descends, and “Snowdonia”—a term invented by Pennant a hundred and thirty years ago—opens up before the advancing explorer; a majestic disarray of tumbled peaks and lesser hills, smeared across with trailing mists. Then, in two miles, comes the hamlet of Pentre Voelas, with the “Voelas Arms,” a slate-fronted inn, by the way, displaying a very elaborately blazoned coat-of-arms over its door. “Toujours Prest” says the motto under that family scutcheon, and a very good motto too. Let us hope it has always been descriptive of the inn also, and that it, unlike Cernioge, was “Always Ready.” From this point it is a seven-mile descent to Bettws-y-Coed and the Vale of Conway: a descent beginning gradually and gently, with pleasant scenery on either side, and culminating in a two-mile length of steep and winding road, with towering rocks overhanging on the one hand, and a deep wood-enshrouded valley on the other. Beside the road stands an inscribed stone that tells how Llewelyn ap Seicyllt, an obscure Prince of Wales, was slain in 1021. Passing Henresea toll-house at five and a half miles from Bettws, the rocky chasm is skirted where the Conway boils and frets and splashes over obstructing boulders, or flows swiftly and with an unwonted calmness over some reach of smooth-slabbed rock. At the bridge of Glan Conway, where the road is taken across, is one of these quiet interludes. The water glides with a silent swiftness, infinitely impressive, over rocks clothed in moss, as it were in green velvet: the “Lincoln green” of Robin Hood and his merry men. Deep pools, a little aside from the main current, have the hue of dilute stout and porter; as though a raft freighted with Barclay and Perkins’ best had made grievous shipwreck here; shallower pools resemble brown sherry, and the sliding main stream, threaded with gold by the glancing sunlight, resembles some god-like brew of nectar or ambrosia, tipped into the kennel and run to waste by the fanaticism of some celestial Wilfrid Lawson. The Conway presently plunges quite out of sight below the mountain road that winds on a cornice at Dinas Hill, lodged midway between the depths and the heights, and buttressed by sturdy masonry against sliding down into the woods whose tree-tops are seen far below. Away ahead, blocking a long valley, the great peaked mountain of Moel Siabod rises up and pretends to be Snowdon; imposing on many a confiding stranger with its 2,800 feet and bold outline, and discounting the real view of Snowdon, 700 feet higher, but not so effectively seen, at Capel Curig. [Illustration: THE WATERLOO BRIDGE.]