The river Neath glides on to its estuary by Briton Ferry, some two miles distant from the town. Hills escort it right to the sea--not all with smoking chimneys on them. The town is indeed quite uniquely hemmed round with beauty, as well as ugliness. Up the valleys of the Dulas and the Clydach, slim streams which join the Neath near its mouth, are nooks and recesses as winsome as those of the Mellte itself; and once on the tops of the mountains, in any direction, the pedestrian may readily forget coal and iron. * * * * * It is but seven or eight, miles from Neath to Swansea, where the /Tawe/ comes to its end, foully enough, amid ironworks and "coalers." One may, for convenience sake, make the journey, and later rise with the river to its source. There is more satisfaction in seeing it gradually purify than in watching its progress from pellucidity to pollution; from the sweet-aired heather hills where Adelina Patti has fixed her quiet home, to the sulphureous atmosphere of Landore and Hafod. Sweyn's Ea (Sweyne's Eye or Inlet), Aber Tawe--or Swansea, as we modern English call it--is not what it was when Sweyne the King and Rover was wont to come hither as a base for his forays into the vales of South Cambria. Still, it can, if it cares to, brag stoutly of its ancient enlistment in the service of carbon. In 1305 it received a charter from William de Brews (Breos), great-grandson of the famous Lord Marcher, "to have pit coal." That was beginning an industrial career early indeed. Four centuries later, in 1709, its jurisdiction as a port extended from Oxwich, in the Gower peninsula, to Chepstow--of course, including the then unborn and unthought--of Cardiff. It began to smelt copper in 1564, thanks to a charter given by Queen Elizabeth; and it is to copper and shipping, quite as much as to its position at the mouth of a great coalfield (estimated still to hold 19,200,000,000 tons of fuel underground), that Swansea owes its fine fortunes and its population of about a hundred thousand.