All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring
all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from
Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables
and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the
payment of such part of the Dissenters’ taxes as would go to the support
of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk
Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I
heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came
of it I do not know.
Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or
at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English
everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round,
so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach.
Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls,
though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have
not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people
of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland
cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief
outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in
the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for
compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and
they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of
bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not
much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there
a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged
Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark
hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.
The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets
of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and
scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass
around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its
hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.