In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably
for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by
the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us
from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during
our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were
no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
good looks of either the men or women was of the American average.
I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the
advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry
which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say
Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem
a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even
tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does
not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in
good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are
beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings,
but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season,
they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept
by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh
girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg
instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings
because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always
appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall
lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would
have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held
out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has
so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene,
compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to
make our stay difficult, and our going easy.
[Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH]
Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon
the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was
not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that
parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled
at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose
bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far
into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the
pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose
slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from
the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other
end was the Amusement Pier, with the co-educational college, which is
part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind
and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans
planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole
means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark
people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh,
often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if
you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the
world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the
people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice.
In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old
times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the
public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found
a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had
planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they
could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined
having the English King’s son born in one of them did they bring the
Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people
broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among
them did.