The road makes an abrupt turn to the left to enter the city of Bangor. The grim stone walls on either side of the forbidding edifice in front do not represent a prison, workhouse, or lunatic asylum, but have at present the honour of housing the University College of North Wales, founded in 1884. Years before that date this was the “Penrhyn Arms” hotel, one of the largest and best on the road, with great resources in the way of reception-rooms, extensive private suites for the considerable personages who travelled to and from Ireland, and stabling for over a hundred horses. A private inclined road leads up to the pillared doorway, and an arch over the public road conducted in those days to the hotel farm and dairy. It is frequently found to be too low to permit the passage of hay and straw waggons and other mountainous loads, with the result that the so-called “private” road is used, and is almost as public as the other. The best side of the building is turned away from the road, and looks from amid wide lawns and beautiful gardens across the Menai Straits to Beaumaris. Here they show with reverence the stump of a fir tree planted by the Princess Victoria in 1832. The tree died in 1899. The interior of the house is, of course, divided into class-rooms, lecture-rooms, and the like. The kitchen and scullery are now a library, and students now swat where fat cooks once sweated before roasting fires. The change is one that would have horrified Colonel Birch-Reynardson, equally with the coachmen and guards of the Holyhead Mail that used to change here in the palmy days of Host Bicknell. [Illustration: THE PENRHYN ARMS.] The Colonel, as an amateur whip, often drove the Mail between Oswestry and Bangor, and tells how others occasionally did the same. There was, for example, one who took a glass or a bottle too much at the “Owen Glendower” at Corwen, and wrought havoc with the mail and other things along the road, with the result that the bags were too late for the packet at Holyhead, and the Post Office authorities heard of it. Result number two was that horse proprietors were severely admonished not to allow any one but the authorised coachman to drive. They did so all the same, but the reins were prudently made to change hands when nearing “the change.” Charlie Harper, who about that time had been promoted from the slower Chester and Holyhead to the fast direct Holyhead Mail, had resigned his ribbons one day to the Colonel, but took them over on nearing Bangor. The Colonel, however, good-humouredly took Bicknell to task for giving _him_ the sack. The hotel-keeper was sorry, but no amateur could drive the Mail again after the wigging he had got from the Post Office.