lack-lustre staring eyes, and upon the whole appeared to be good for very little. Leaving him, we went some way up the principal street; presently my wife turned into a shop, and I, observing a little bookstall, went up to it, and began to inspect the books. They were chiefly in Welsh. Seeing a kind of chap book, which bore on its title-page the name of Twm O’r Nant, I took it up. It was called Y Llwyn Celyn, or the Holly Grove, and contained the life and one of the interludes of Tom O’ the Dingle, or Thomas Edwards. It purported to be the first of four numbers, each of which, amongst other things, was to contain one of his interludes. The price of the number was one shilling. I questioned the man of the stall about the other numbers, but found that this was the only one which he possessed. Eager, however, to read an interlude of the celebrated Tom, I purchased it, and turned away from the stall. Scarcely had I done so, when I saw a wild-looking woman, with two wild children, looking at me. The woman curtseyed to me, and I thought I recognised the elder of the two Irish females whom I had seen in the tent on the green meadow near Chester. I was going to address her, but just then my wife called to me from the shop, and I went to her, and when I returned to look for the woman she and her children had disappeared, and though I searched about for her, I could not see her, for which I was sorry, as I wished very much to have some conversation with her about the ways of the Irish wanderers. I was thinking of going to look for her up “Paddy’s dingle,” but my wife, meeting me, begged me to go home with her, as it was getting late. So I went home with my better half, bearing my late literary acquisition in my hand. That night I sat up very late reading the life of Twm O’r Nant, written by himself in choice Welsh, and his interlude, which was styled “Cyfoeth a Thylody; or, Riches and Poverty.” The life I had read in my boyhood in an old Welsh magazine, and I now read it again with great zest, and no wonder, as it is probably the most remarkable autobiography ever penned. The interlude I had never seen before, nor indeed any of the dramatic pieces of Twm O’r Nant, though I had frequently wished to procure some of them—so I read the present one with great eagerness. Of the life I shall give some account, and also some extracts from it, which will enable the reader to judge of Tom’s personal character, and also an abstract of the interlude, from which the reader may form a tolerably correct idea of the poetical powers of him whom his countrymen delight to call “the Welsh Shakespear.” CHAPTER LIX History of Twm O’r Nant—Eagerness for Learning—The First Interlude—The Cruel Fighter—Raising Wood—The Luckless Hour—Turnpike-Keeping—Death in the Snow—Tom’s Great Feat—The Muse a Friend—Strength in Old Age—Resurrection of the Dead.