At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased
in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed
into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be
civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New
England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more
caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is
more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated
farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the
university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.
The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever
we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track,
there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we
began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was
not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to
the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then
a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West
of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more
amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they
seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in
Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors
superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not
push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of
the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the
republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King’s
Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have
been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too
literally.
Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean
there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young
people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was
not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the
church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes.
Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency
and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the
picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women
still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion
of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear
hard, shiny black straw hats like the men’s. Amongst the throng of
Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so
often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say,
even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much
more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a
day of pleasure rather than praise.