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At bottom, neither the good fishing nor the illness of ancient Mrs. Pritchard had been the real cause of Dafydd Dafis's procrastination in the matter of the match-boarding—any more than those greased cartridges were the real cause of the Mutiny. He was merely vindicating the claims of a temperament that kept him, and would always keep him, poor, yet a power. He was a day-labourer, whom anybody could hire to build a wall, mend a thatch or caulk a boat; but—and this was the secret of his influence—he had a harp in his cottage. In a glorious baritone voice he sang Mentra Gwen, Y Deryn Pur, and lorn songs of love and wild songs of battle. More than that, he sang penillion; and as penillion—which is an extempore form of song into which you may plunge at any point you please, provided you finish pat and triumphant with the double bar—as penillion concerns itself mainly with two themes, namely, the loved mountains and lakes of Cambria, and quick and topical inventions of personal gossip, Dafydd Dafis held his hearers both by their deeper sentiments and their lighter foibles. He was a spare and roughly clad man of thirty, unmarried, with a kindling eye, a handsome nose, and a ragged dark moustache; and when his head was bowed by the side of his harp, all the life of him seemed to run out into the lean and roughened fingers on the strings.

He came to see Edward Garden about that match-boarding on the Saturday morning, bringing a youth of eighteen with him. Edward Garden, who had had experience of the Welsh in Liverpool, which is the capital of Wales, received him with resignation. Fair and softly goes far in a day, and he knew that the luxury of chiding the bard of Llanyglo would prove a dear one did Mrs. Garden find her egg supply suddenly fail and the Llanyglo cows mysteriously cease to yield milk.

His forbearance was rewarded. Before he departed for Manchester on the Monday morning he had the satisfaction of seeing Dafydd Dafis and the youth actually begin the job. No doubt it would be finished by the time divinely appointed for its finishing.

But whether Dafydd Dafis sang much as he worked, or worked a little as he sang, remained an open question.

Now in whatever other respects Llanyglo may have changed, its air then was the same air that the Guide Book so justly praises to-day. Minetta felt the benefit of it at once. During her illness she had had her dark hair close-cropped; for fear of taking cold, she still wore a red "pirate" cap, that is, a cone of knitted wool with a bob at the peak that fell on one side of her head: and for the same reason she wore black stockings pulled well up over the bamboo-like joints of her bony knees. She was a slight, dark pixy of a child, on whom so much care had been expended that she had begun to care for herself and to talk wisely about draughts and wet feet; and sometimes she consoled herself for the loss of her hair by repeating her mother's assurance, that it would grow the more strongly afterwards.

But within a fortnight of the Gardens' settling at Llanyglo there was no further thought of taking her back home until the cold weather should come. Her doll's-house and paint-box were sent for. Her health continued to improve. By and by she was to be found squatted down by the sand-blown palings, surrounded by the Llanyglo children, keeping a shop, of which the commodities were shells, pebbles, starfish and the like. Her dolls and their house were neglected. But the other little girls, who had seen these wonders once, sometimes lingered wistfully about Mrs. Garden's door, looking within, and whispering, "There it is, Gwladys—see, by the cloch——"

Long before the match-boarding of a single room was completed, John Willie Garden, whom at first his mother had not been able to drive out of doors, had lost interest in Dafydd Dafis, his sawing, his hammering, and his songs. He disappeared by the half-day together. It was a holiday time at the school by the Baptist Chapel, and, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd and other youngsters as his companions, he scrambled among the rocks at the base of the Trwyn, or climbed the headland itself, or digged for bait, or went out in the boats, or fished for crabs with split mussels off the jetty end (he stuffed his catch up underneath his blue jersey, where the animals crawled about on his friendly and naked skin). The rainbow curves of the children ceased when he or Minetta appeared, but they continued as a salute to Mrs. Garden. The weather continued superb: it rained scarcely at all. The mountains were never for two hours the same; the sea in the evenings was mother-of-pearl; and the rising moon seemed to stand up on it, like the lateen of a felucca of gold.

Mrs. Garden sent to Manchester for her tricycle.

Then the school by the Baptist Chapel re-opened, and for some days John Willie, hanging idly about and listening to the droning within, was undecided whether to give the insulting cry of liberty or to lament that he was left to his own devices. He himself would not have to go back to school till the middle of September. Then he still further enlarged his circle of acquaintance. He attached himself to a farmer's lad, who shot rabbits of an evening among the sandhills, and, after being allowed to fire the gun, gave his catapult away to a "kid." July passed. The match-boarding progressed by fits and starts. It was now Minetta who impeded its progress. Dafydd Dafis loved her as if she had been his own child, and told her stories of dragons and knights and enchantments and fairies, and sang Mentra Gwen to her, all by the hour together, careless whether Edward Garden paid him for those same hours or not.

With the passing of August, Llanyglo had made far more difference to the Gardens than the Gardens had to Llanyglo. Indeed, Llanyglo looked like absorbing them altogether, as animals not ultimately capable of domestication are sucked back into the feral state. In the matter of dress, for example, they had deteriorated alarmingly. Half his days John Willie spent in and out of the water without a stitch on him, and he no longer had a pair of sand-shoes to his name.—And Minetta? First she lost the bob from the peak of her red "pirate" cap, and then the cap itself was cast aside. From careful nightly brushings of her "new" pleated navy-blue frock with the white braid, she allowed the pleats to get full of sand, and, where the prints of her ribbed soles had been, now her bare feet patterned the beach. Her bamboo legs were brown as seaweed and barked up the shins; and when (with a totally abandoned display of knickers) she emptied her shoes of sand, she would sit down in a pool as soon as not.—And Mrs. Garden? Not for worlds would she have had anybody from Manchester see her as she returned on her tricycle from bathing among the Trwyn rocks, sessile on the saddle, a mackintosh over her voluminous bathing-dress, a towel cast across her shoulders, and her plump ivory legs rising and falling on the pedals like the twin cranks of a vertical human engine. Yes, the Gardens were slipping back into savagery. They were becoming part of Llanyglo. Manchester seemed, not so much a hundred miles, as a hundred years away.

And when, on a Monday morning, it became necessary that Mrs. Garden should put on her garments of civilisation again and traverse those hundred miles, or years, in order to see how her other home was getting on, the whole population gathered about the Royal Hotel shandrydan that came to take her to Porth Neigr, and tears stood in eyes, and sobs choked throats, and shawls and hands and handkerchiefs were waved as the vehicle started off over the muffling sandhills, and as many promises were made that Minetta and John Willie should be well looked after as if she had been departing never to return, instead of coming back again on the Friday. Howell Gruffydd picked a tear from his eye with his little finger, and spoke of the mutability of human affairs.

"The one is ta-a-ke, the other left," he said. "It is all change. Dear dear, it make me think of my cousin Evan Evans, of Carnarvon, and his three boys, as fine boys as ever you see, and so-a hap-py, all living under one roof, till Mary Evans die and wass buried, and the changes come, and where are those boys now? They are scatter. One is in Bangor, and one is in Menai Bridge, and one is in Pwllheli. Dear me! Dear me! Mrs. Garden was a very kind one. There was no kinder 'ooman. Al-ways the sa-a-me. She seem like one of ourselves. Well, well——"

And he picked away another tear, as grief-stricken as if he had been reciting an epitaph "Er Serchog Cof Am Amelia Garden."

Then, when on the Friday she duly returned, there was as much rejoicing as if she had been a sister, come back again from a long wandering.

Mrs. Garden had brought back with her in the Royal Hotel conveyance wellnigh as much luggage as had laden the vehicle on their first coming; for it had been decided that Minetta's stay was to be still further prolonged. So warm clothing had been brought, and more blankets, and a screen for the door, and a small family medicine-chest, and Minetta's Compendium Box of Games. And that was bad news for John Willie Garden, for it brought the shadow of his own departure near; and yet it was good news too, for it seemed to promise a more sure establishment in the place, with perhaps another visit for himself during the Christmas holidays. He could not think how the summer days had slipped away, and grew doleful as he remembered how few of them now remained.

Then, when September was a week or so old, he climbed the Trwyn in order to take his good-bye look at Llanyglo.

A straggling row of cottages, a few paths over the sandhills, three Chapels, a school, and a few scattered farms: the rest, mountains, sea, and air. The tide was creaming over the short thumb of a jetty, and the herd of small black cows was patrolling the beach. Morgan's cottage, Roberts's cottage, their own cottage, not more than a dozen other cottages; and then Howell Gruffydd's shop: already the place was full of memories for John Willie Garden. That wide pool in the sands that reflected the sky had not been there a fortnight before—for the sea had now lost its summer look, and it changed the configuration of the shore at night. A puff of low-blown smoke showed where Dafydd Dafis was giving a boat a coat of tar. There was the small crack of a gun—John Willie's friend was shooting rabbits. On the top of Mrs. Roberts's chimney a new flat stone had been placed, and a new staple for the shutter had been driven into the wall. John Willie had still no stockings on, but he was sensible now of the wind on his legs. They were as brown as rope. His hands too were brown and grimy, and smelt pleasant. That morning he had been helping the men to get in the winter peat. …

So he watched, and at tea-time he descended; but already he was making up the exultant tales he would tell the boys of his form, of the spanking place where his father had taken a cottage and might presently be building a house. He would boast over them in the Welsh words he had learned, and triumph no end that they did not understand him. Only to a few of his special friends would he confide the meanings of his expressions in English.

Three days later he was doing even so, at Pannal School, near Harrogate, in Yorkshire.

Mr. Garden came to Llanyglo once more, bringing a doctor with him this time in order that Minetta's health might be authoritatively reported upon, and again he departed. The cottages, which in summer had been places to live outside of, began to have a comfortable look as the afternoons drew in. Minetta wore her boots and stockings again now, and her maroon serge frock with the white collar, and Mrs. Garden put her tricycle away in the little lean-to behind the house, smothering the bright parts with vaseline and covering it up with sacking. The last—the very last—piece of match-board had been nailed in its place, and all had been pale oak-varnished, so that the sheen of the fire could be seen in the walls. The glowing peats were reflected too, in still red spots, in the black glass rolling-pin, the brass candlesticks, the windows of the dolls' house, the plates and lustre jugs, and the china sitting hen where they kept the eggs. The wind began to hoot in the throat of the chimney. Mrs. Garden's ears became accustomed to the louder falling of the breakers; soon the cessation of this noise would have been the arresting thing. October wore on. There was very little fishing now. Each of the three Chapels had a week-night service, and nearly everybody went to all three. Twice the schoolroom was thrown open for concerts; but most of the singing took place in the kitchen. Sometimes, on the edge of the dark, a fantastic irregular shape would be seen, rising and dipping and lurching as it approached over the sandhills; it was Dafydd Dafis, carrying on his back the wooden case that contained his harp. Save for these infrequent diversions, the winter was a dead time at Llanyglo. The hamlet rolled itself up and hibernated. Mrs. Garden sometimes sighed for a Hallé concert, or a dance, or "a few friends in the evening," but she bore up for the sake of the dry and sunny and exhilarating days and the good they did Minetta. Minetta got out her dolls, their house, and the Compendium Box of Games; and she and Gwladys Roberts and Morwenna Morgan and Mary Price, with the oil lamp on the table and the firelight glowing low on the ceiling, had spring-cleanings of the mimic dwelling (to which the Welsh children did not take with any great heartiness), and epidemics among the dolls (which were more interesting), and once a funeral (to which they gave themselves rapturously). They played Snap and Fishponds, and then Minetta set about the making of a picture screen, with coloured figures which she cut from the Queen and Lady's Pictorial and plain ones which she coloured with her paint-box.

At Christmas Mr. Garden and John Willie came down, the former for a few days, John Willie for a fortnight. One of his days Mr. Garden spent in a visit to Squire Wynne, who lived at the Plas, three miles away. The sea was some days as black as iron, on others as white as ash with the tumult of the wind. There was snow on the mountains, but little at Llanyglo. Even John Willie did not want to bathe. In the daytime he tried to rig up a sail on his mother's tricycle, so that he might coast along the two miles of beach before the wind; at night he often walked down to the edge of the dimly creaming water, and stood looking out into the blackness, or else at the Trwyn Light, two reds and a white.

Squire Wynne, the former owner of the Royal Hotel shandrydan, was the ground landlord of Llanyglo, and the reason of Edward Garden's Christmas call on him was—still quite simply and on Minetta's account—that he had decided to build and wanted certain land to build on. But this was not quite the simple matter it might have appeared to be. With this, that, and the other, the Squire floundered in a morass of mortgages, and, for the scraping together of his interest money, could scarce have re-papered the dilapidated walls of the Plas dining-room. He had other property also, thirty miles down the coast, which he had never the heart to go and see. It was there that the family fortunes had been sunk. A score of broken shaft-chimneys and heaps of fallen masonry on a promontory were all he had to show for the good Wynne money—these, and a deed-box full of scrip and warrants which you could have had for the price of the stamps on them. For that remote volcanic waste had been a happy hunting-ground for the prospectus-monger with hopeful views on paying quantities, and the Squire had granted more concessions than he could count. It was to be presumed that somebody had made money out of the concessions, if not out of the mines themselves. The last enterprise had been manganese.

"Let me pour you out a glass of port first; it's the only thing I have that hasn't some sort of a charge on it," said the Squire. He was a heavy man of near sixty, the owner of a family pew in Porth Neigr Church, a stickler for rainbowing, and, in a feckless sort of way, something of an antiquary. His adherence to the three-bottle habit helped to make the fortunes of several quacks in our own day, who advertise infallible cures for the neuritis he and his kind have bequeathed to their descendants. The only sign the Squire himself showed of this was a slightly ochreous eye.—Then, when he had poured out the port, "It's you who have the money nowadays," he said, meaning by "you" Gladstonian Liberals. "Look at this ceiling of mine. There isn't a ceiling in Wales with a finer coffering, but look at the state it's in!—And that chandelier! It holds forty candles, but I can't afford 'em! This is what I use." He pointed to his father's old reservoir colza lamp on the table.—"And I'll show you the staircase presently. … Sell? It won't make sixpence difference to me one way or the other. Which piece is it you want?"

Mr. Garden told him.

"Well, you'd better see my man about it. Sheard, Porth Neigr, next to the corn-chandler's shop. Or I'll see him if you like. But if we do come to terms I should like to give you a piece of advice."

"What is that?" Edward Garden asked.

"I suppose you're not Welsh by any chance?"

"No."

"Well, I'm half Welsh, and things jog on well enough as long as I'm alive. There are all sorts of questions that simply don't arise. But they're a queer people here, and when you get to the bottom of it, practically the question of landowning resolves itself into keeping on the right side of Dafydd Dafis, if you see what I mean." It was not necessary to tell Edward Garden that, but he begged the Squire to go on.

"For instance," the Squire continued, "I've a couple of mortgages foreclosing any time now—Sheard will tell you—I don't even know who the mortgagees are. But if they're Welsh, so much the better for them. I mean if they introduce changes, or go at things like a bull at a gate, they'll wish I'd gone on paying them interest. A smile does more than a smack here. If they inclose, for example——"

"Ah, this new Act——"

"Or any other Act There was a case at that No Man's Land of mine over there——" The Squire jerked his head in the direction of the shafts where the family fortunes had been sunk. "An Englishman came, and began to fence, and there was a Dafydd Dafis sort of fellow there, and this man Rodgers thought that because he wore strings round the knees of his corduroys he wasn't anybody of consequence … and there you are. The only thing Edward the First could do with the bards was to destroy them, and they're the same breed yet.—So that's my advice. For the rest, you'd better see Sheard. Have another glass of port."

And, after he had been shown the magnificent ruin of a staircase, and had noted without showing the grass on the Squire's paths and the moss in the Squire's grass, Edward Garden thanked the Squire for his advice and took his leave. He was able to come to terms with Sheard, and in the following spring a new house began to go up in Llanyglo.

The site Edward Garden had selected for his house lay a little way behind the row of cottages, over the thatches of which it looked out to the sea. Rock cropped up there, amid a waste of bents and potentilla and sea-thrift and thyme, and a rill slipped over moss and, a little further on, disappeared into the sand, to emerge again down by the shore. From a stone quarry on the Porth Neigr road stone was still being got for the extension of Porth Neigr itself; and it would actually be nearer to bring it to Llanyglo. Sheard saw to that also, and Edward Garden, taking the Squire's advice, put Dafydd Dafis, match-boarder, in charge of the work. It would take time, but it would save time. And, so long as it was understood that it was Dafydd Dafis who might say to this man "Come," and he came, and to the other "Go," and he went, Edward Garden did not anticipate difficulties did he wish, later, to "stiffen" his supply of labour by importing a plumber, or a mason, or a carpenter or two from Manchester.

So, in the spring, the rock was cleared and chisels began to clink; and John Willie Garden, away at school in Pannal, could scarce contain himself until the summer holidays should come. He sent, by letter, the most peremptory specifications. His room was to be thus and thus, and not otherwise. The letters also contained complaints to his mother that his health was seriously impaired by arduous study; so was the health of his friend Percy Briggs: indeed, all the fellows were remarking how greatly in need of a change of air he and Percy seemed. Mrs. Garden's chief preoccupation was that the new house should have water upstairs and a cupboard at every turn.

And as that was the first building of their own that the folk of Llanyglo had ever seen, its progress became their daily talk. The farmers came from inland to look at it, and, as the weather grew milder, the fishermen no longer smoked of an evening under the shelter of their boats down by the jetty, but instead made a kind of club-house of the triangular pile of floor-boards that the Porth Neigr timber merchant presently delivered. They climbed inside this slatted prism, hung the interstices with sacking as a protection from the wind, and smoked and talked, while the stars peeped down on them. They talked of progress and innovation, and of how little they had ever thought they would live to see such a change as this on the face of their sandhills.

"But it will not be as big as the Plas, whatever," one of them would remark, not so much as belittling Edward Garden's new house as in order to correct a certain tendency to wild and disproportionate talk. Indeed, they were proud of Llanyglo's growth. Only the building of another chapel could have made them prouder.

"Aw-w-w, William Morgan, h-what a way to talk!" another would reply. "You talk like a great simpleton! You say next it is not so big as the railway station at Porth Neigr! Indeed, the Plas is big-ger, but it is di-lap-i-date, a pit-ty to see, and the staircase—aw-w-w dear! They do say Squire Wynne he go in lit-tle bedroom, not to fall through the floor!"

"And the stables is lock up, all but one stall, and you shan't find a handful of corn there, no, not more than will feed one horse!"

"There was sixteen horses there——"

"And the Squire, he hunt——"

"It all go to that Abercelyn in the mines—thousands of pounds!—-"

"There is land here to build stables if Mr. Garden wiss——"

"Indeed, Hugh Roberts, if he build any more we be bigger than Porth Neigr, whatever!—-"

And this hyperbole always raised a laugh. Porth Neigr, besides being the head of the railway, had a market place, two banks, a stone quay, a court house, and an English Church.

The house rose higher and higher, and by the time John Willie Garden came again, in July, it had reached the first floor. Long rows of roof slates were stacked under a temporary shed, and, as if he had not had lessons enough in the school by the Baptist Chapel, Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd did multiplication sums and Welsh-English exercises upon them. John Willie's eyes danced when they saw the scaffolding and ladders. He was six rungs up a ladder before you could have turned round. He was up that ladder and down a second and up a third almost as quickly, nor did he take breath until, short of swarming up the scaffold-poles, he had stood on the topmost point of the structure. Then, with the air of something accomplished, he condescended to the level ground again.

Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of the farms and cottages, to the tenants of which they were bound by ties of consanguinity; the others put up at the little alehouse half a mile out on the Porth Neigr road, which served also as a shop for the outlying farms. Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth near the mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. John Willie dined daily with them. Never was such importance as that with which he came nigh to bursting. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the Trwyn, no longer called him; here was not only a house going up, but his house. In his father's absence he could give orders. He became knowing in limes and mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He strutted about with a square, setting it carelessly against angles, and derided Eesaac Oliver and his slates and long-division sums. The eaves-level was reached; they began to get the roof-timbers up; the sandhills resounded with hammering and sawing; and the upper part of the house began to resemble a toast-rack against the sky. Only one stone remained to be set in position. This was the gable-stone with "E. G., 1882" upon it. John Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which he ciphered would soon be required.

As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Already three men, a plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, had been down from Manchester, and fresh supplies of timber—sections of staircase and so on—had come in carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all at once the work came to a sudden stop—how that toast-rack stood against the sky for another year without a slate upon it—and how Edward Garden, away in Manchester, had once more to accept the line of least resistance, while his son loitered disconsolately about the unfinished building until something even more exciting claimed his interest—to tell these things another chapter had better be begun.