Flowing from the sides of Cader Idris, which holds a gloomy lake in its lap, there is a complex network of streams. Several of these join themselves together to form the little river Dysynni, which, after wandering among the mountains for twelve miles or so, drowns itself in the sea beyond Towyn. One of the sources of the Dysynni is Tal-y-Llyn. Noble and beautiful and ever memorable is the valley through which the stream hurries downwards from that renowned lake, the object of innumerable excursions made from Dolgelley, from Towyn, from Machynlleth, and from all the wild, wonderful, fascinating places roundabout. Tal-y-Llyn is no more than a mile long, and a quarter of a mile broad; but it is like a small piece of Norway transported to Wales. Here alike come those who are intent on reaching the summit of Cader Idris, and those who desire to follow "the contemplative man's recreation," for the Dysynni, like the Dovey, is a famous fishing river. Salmon, sewin, and gwyniad are to be found therein, from May until after the autumn leaves are falling. There are white and sea trout, and bass, and in the estuary plentiful grey mullet, which make fine and exciting sport when a ring of nets is thrown around them, and the noisy and vigorous "beaters" drive them into the meshes. [Illustration: THE LOWER BRIDGE, TORRENT WALK (_p. 199_).] One must go up the Dysynni to see the famous "Bird Rock," a great shoulder of mountain on which the hawk and the cormorant dwell. It is so precipitous that it may be climbed on only two of its sides, and it has one of those echoes for which Wales is almost unapproachable, so that the music of any instrument that is played upon it will be reverberated in a startling chorus from all the surrounding hills. Lower down the river, always amid such scenery as it were vain to describe, there is the site of a manor house from which Prince Llewelyn wrote important letters to ecclesiastical magnates in London, and which that stout soldier-king Edward I. visited, for he dated a charter thence. Older relics there are, like the Tomen Ddreiniog, which, maybe, is one of "the grassy barrows of the happier dead." It is a valley renowned for its birds and their songs, this of the Dysynni, and for its rare plants and mosses, and its rich store of maiden-hair fern. As we approach Towyn the mansion of Ynys-y-Maengwyn, the dwelling of an ancient Welsh family, presents a quaint and most picturesque mixture of architectural periods, for it combines all the styles of domestic architecture that prevailed between the period of Elizabeth and that of the Georges.