No longer is it necessary for travellers to wait shivering for days before winds and weather permit of the Channel being crossed. They arrive nowadays for the most part at dark and ungodly hours, at railway terminus or harbour, and are at once whisked away to Dublin or to London. Some may make acquaintance with the Railway Hotel, but, beyond that, Holyhead merely stands for a name and an hour in the time-tables. It was different before the steam packets began from July 1st, 1819, to make the sixty-four miles passage in 7½ hours. To wait a week at Holyhead before the crossing could be made was no unusual experience in the old sailing days, when a good average passage took fifteen hours, and a very bad one more than double the time. Even the journey by steamer has been cut down to half its duration, and now takes only from 3½ to 4 hours, so that the passengers who halt at Holyhead are few and far between, and the town lives only in an indirect way on the traffic between the kingdoms. It remains no more than a fringe of hilly, gaunt, and aimless streets gathered round the harbour and railway station, with the old church of St. Cybi in their midst, its central tower surmounted by what has been described as “a low, flat spire.” The traveller will doubtless be as eager to see this curiosity of a flat spire as he would to discover a round square, a square angle, or anything else equally unknown to Euclid. LVII There still stands, at the entrance to the Pier, the granite archway erected to commemorate the landing of George IV. in 1821. Severely classical, in the Doric sort, it resembles (save that it is not so large and not so black) the funereal entrance to the Euston terminus of the London and North-Western Railway. It bears an inscription in Welsh—“Cof-Adail i Ymweliad y Brenin Gior y IV. ag ynys fôn. Awst VII., MDCCCXXI.”—which those whose Pentecostal attainments render it possible may translate. Holyhead was a proud town that day, August 7th, when George IV. landed, on his trip to Ireland. He had come, aboard the yacht _Royal George_, round by St. George’s Channel, escorted by a squadron, and spent five days in the Isle of Anglesey, detained by contrary winds. “His Majesty,” says a contemporary report, “was struck with admiration at the appearance of the town”; and we in our turn might well be struck with astonishment, were it not that modern monarchs are the best of actors and can smile approval to order.