“Well,” said Bicknell, “this won’t do. Will you drive them, Mr. Reynardson, till you find Jack Williams on the other side of the bridge?” “No,” said the obstinate Colonel, “you may drive them yourself, if you like; I won’t touch them.” Things looked bad; Bicknell was no coachman; Hodgson said he could not, and Reynardson that he would not, drive, and there seemed none of the horsekeepers competent to perform the feat. So at last, Mr. Bicknell, putting on his most affable face, said: “Mr. Reynardson, Sir, will you be so kind as to take them across the bridge? I shall be very much obliged to you if you will.” “Oh! Oh!” said the pacified amateur, “if you are going to be obliged, or anything of that kind, I don’t mind obliging you, Mr. Bicknell,” and the thing was done. XLIX Bangor is a forbidding place—a squalid and uninteresting mile-length of street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor, climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone. The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866 to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here, has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.