The Glen of Beavers is a beautiful spot from the standpoint of the tourist, if not of the farmers, who have with infinite labour collected the scattered boulders, and built boundary walls with them; and essay to grow corn and hay in the bottom, where the Ogwen stream goes prattling in summer on its winding course. The Ogwen is no friend to the farmer, for walls and stacks and earth are often carried away in winter by the innocent looking brook, that arises at such times and, clearing the fields far and wide in an irresistible flood, deposits stones where the good earth bad been, and carries the earth itself in solution down to Bangor, and so out to sea. Before agriculture can feel secure here, locks and dams should regulate the tricksy watercourse, just as was done by the dams the beavers built in the unrecorded ages, before ever the farmer came. [Illustration: NANT FFRANCON.] At the foot of the descent is Tyn-y-Maes——the House in the Meadow, a hamlet where an inn stood in coaching days to supply relays for the last stage into Bangor, and where, one may be quite sure, the coachmen and passengers coming down or going up, partook of those creature comforts the rigours of the journey demanded. A coachman was said to have lost his eyesight from the effects of a snowstorm at Nant Ffrancon. It is a woeful exchange from the quiet streams and the rural sights of the last few miles to Bethesda and the hideous slate quarries that gash the hillsides. “A Scriptural name,” said Borrow, when a chance acquaintance on the road told him the name of the village. “Is it?” said he; “well, if its name is Scriptural, the manners of its people are by no means so.” If the appearance of Bethesda (now a town, and a very mean and ugly one) were any criterion of the character of its inhabitants, then, the Bethesda people would be past praying for. It is a long, long street of the most furiously ugly houses that ever roof was put to, and the whole of its surroundings are pitifully sordid. Whether cheap stucco or slate be the building materials, the result is the same, and the generations of quarrymen who have laboured to enrich Lord Penrhyn and his ancestors are doomed to dwell in a most squalid place, within sight of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.