Wild Wales: The People, Language, & SceneryBorrow, George
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Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery
Borrow, George
Borrow, George, 1803-1881 -- Travel -- Wales; Wales -- Description and travel
Sunday Night—Sleep, Sin, and Old Age—The Dream—Lanikin Figure—A Literary
Purchase.
The Sunday morning was a gloomy one. I attended service at church with
my family. The service was in English, and the younger Mr. E— preached.
The text I have forgotten, but I remember perfectly well that the sermon
was scriptural and elegant. When we came out the rain was falling in
torrents. Neither I nor my family went to church in the afternoon. I,
however, attended the evening service, which is always in Welsh. The
elder Mr. E— preached. Text, 2 Cor. x. 5. The sermon was an admirable
one, admonitory, pathetic and highly eloquent; I went home very much
edified, and edified my wife and Henrietta, by repeating to them in
English the greater part of the discourse which I had been listening to
in Welsh. After supper, in which I did not join, for I never take
supper, provided I have taken dinner, they went to bed, whilst I remained
seated before the fire, with my back near the table, and my eyes fixed
upon the embers, which were rapidly expiring, and in this posture sleep
surprised me. Amongst the proverbial sayings of the Welsh, which are
chiefly preserved in the shape of triads, is the following one: “Three
things come unawares upon a man—sleep, sin, and old age.” This saying
holds sometimes good with respect to sleep and old age, but never with
respect to sin. Sin does not come unawares upon a man; God is just, and
would never punish a man as He always does for being overcome by sin, if
sin were able to take him unawares; and neither sleep nor old age always
come unawares upon a man. People frequently feel themselves going to
sleep, and feel old age stealing upon them; though there can be no doubt
that sleep and old age sometimes come unawares—old age came unawares upon
me; it was only the other day that I was aware that I was old, though I
had long been old, and sleep came unawares upon me in that chair in which
I had sat down without the slightest thought of sleeping. And there as I
sat I had a dream—what did I dream about? the sermon, musing upon which I
had been overcome by sleep? not a bit! I dreamt about a widely different
matter. Methought I was in Llangollen fair, in the place where the pigs
were sold, in the midst of Welsh drovers, immense hogs and immense men,
whom I took to be the gents of Wolverhampton. What huge fellows they
were! almost as huge as the hogs for which they higgled; the generality
of them dressed in brown sporting coats, drab breeches, yellow-topped
boots, splashed all over with mud, and with low-crowned, broad-brimmed
hats. One enormous fellow particularly caught my notice. I guessed he
must have weighed at least eleven score, he had a half-ruddy,
half-tallowy face, brown hair, and rather thin whiskers. He was higgling
with the proprietor of an immense hog, and as he higgled he wheezed as if
he had a difficulty of respiration, and frequently wiped off, with a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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