A discourse on mountains. Turf-cutters, and Moor haymakers. Twm rescues
the lady of Ystrad Ffîn, and captures a highwayman, whom he brings in
triumph to Llandovery.
HAVING travelled together a few miles further into the mountain, Twm
expressed his wonder at seeing the turf-cutters and haymakers following
their avocations almost side by side in this wild district. “Well,”
cried he, “I know that much has been said, sung, and written, in praise
of mountain scenery; and where ’tis truly romantic as well as wild, I am
a great lover of it myself; but this before us is my aversion. Here no
sound salutes the ear but the lonely cry of a few melancholy kites,
hungry enough to prey upon one another; and no objects strike the eye but
the flat tame desert, and a few wretched cottages thinly scattered over
this desolate region, whose inhabitants are miserably employed in
scooping peat from the marsh for their fires, or cutting their bald thin
crop of hay from the uninclosed mountain—_the gwair rhos cwtta_, or moor
hay, which, dispensing with the incumbrance of a cart or sledge, the
women carry home in their aprons, as the winter maintenance of a
half-starved cow. Even the shepherds and their flocks are wise enough to
keep from this gloomy seat of starvation; but the dull plodding
turf-cutters are numerous enough. To me there is nothing that associates
more with squalid poverty than turf fires: the crackling faggot and the
Christmas log, have their rustic characteristics; coal has its proud and
solid warmth; the clay-and-culm fires of Cardigan and Pembrokeshire,
formed of balls, and fantastically arranged by the industrious hands of
fair maidens, are bright and durable, revealing the gay faces of the
cheerful semicircular group—and above all, the smokeless cleanly stone
coal: but turf, smoky, ill-savored, ash creating, dusty turf—recals the
marsh and moor, rain-loaded skies, and fern-thatched cottages, whose
battered roofs swept by the blast, discover the rotten rafters grinning
like the bare ribs of poverty; and worse than all, the joyless faces of
the toil-bowed children of the desert. I heartily agree with the
sentiment of the old Pennill {152a}
“How gay seems the valley with rich waving wheat,
Fair lands and fair houses, with shelters so neat;
While the whole feather’d choir to delight us conspires,
There’s nought on the mountain but turf and turf fires.”
“And let me add,” cried Twm, with vivacity, “as indicative of my own
taste on the subject, a Triban {152b} of my own composition.—
Three things—to my mind each with loveliness teems:
A vale between mountains that’s threaded by streams;
A neat white-wall’d cottage mid gardens and trees;
And a young married pair that appreciate these.”
“The mountains, like the plains and vallies,” replied Rhys, “have of
course their rough and unsightly portions; but so very dear to me are the
sensations connected with our _Mountain Land_, that I could kiss the sod
of its dullest region, when I remember how it came the refuge of our
war-worsted forefathers in the days of old, as the waned star of liberty
seemed to have vanished forever from our sphere.” Rhys’s patriotic
enthusiasm rose as he proceeded. “I could as soon twit my beloved mother
with the furrows which time has ploughed on her brows, as censure the
homeliest part of our dear mountains, hallowed of old by the tread of
freemen, when the despot foreigner usurped the vallies.
“Freedom, amid a cloudy clime,
Erects her mountain throne sublime,
While natives of the vales and plains
Are gall’d with yokes and slavish chains;—
Then shrink we ne’er, unnerved as bann’d,
In the cloudy clime of the Mountain Land.
Turban’d in her folds of mist
Our Mountain Land the sky hath kiss’d
While on her brow the native wreath
Of yellow furze and purple heath;
The rural reign her vales command,
And the freemen’s swords of the Mountain Land.”
Twm felt the observations of the curate as a rebuke for his flippancies,
and was about to clear himself from all suspicion of lack of nationality;
but the latter at that moment looking up at the sun, declared the day so
far advanced that he must of necessity instantly mount his horse and ride
with speed, so as to meet the vicar of Llandovery at the place appointed;
on which, directing Twm in the route he was to take, he rode off and left
him to pursue his way at leisure.
After thus parting with Mr. Rhys, Twm made his way alone, wrapped in
thought, and looking neither to the right or left, for several miles, but
was at length brought to a stand by the discovery that the way he trod
had ceased to be either a road or beaten path; and that he was actually
pacing the trackless mountain, with the disagreeable conviction that he
had gone wrong, without a clue to recover the right way.
Observing a _bwlch_, or gap, parting the mountains in the distance, where
they rose to a considerable elevation, he naturally concluded that the
road ran through it. Acting on this opinion, he hurried on, and was much
gratified to find his conjecture realized, as a good beaten road
presented itself to him. He entered it, and hastened on with the utmost
alacrity, till he came to a cottage on the road side, opposite to which
was an immense rick of turf, that at a distance looked like a long black
barn. He called at the cottage, and asked if he was right in his route
to Llandovery, “Right!” squeaked a thin old man who met him at the door,
“God bless you young man, you could not be more wrong, as your back is to
Llandovery, and you are making straight for Trecastle.”
This was mortifying intelligence; and the old man seeing Twm’s chagrin,
asked him to walk in and rest himself, an invitation that he gladly
accepted. “What, I suppose you thought to be at Llandovery to hear the
great preaching there to day?” said the man’s wife, a little fat woman
who was carding wool by the fire. “No,” replied Twm, “I never heard of
any preaching that was to be there.” “That’s very odd,” rejoined the old
man, “as the whole country has been crowding there, to hear the good Rhys
Prichard, the great vicar of Llandovery.” “I have heard he is very
popular,” said Twm. “Popular!” screamed the weazon-faced old man, as if
indignant of the coldness of our hero’s eulogy, “he is the shining light
of our times, and hardly less than a prophet; wisely has he called his
divine book the _Welshman’s Candle_, for it blazes with exceeding
brightness, and men find their way by it from the darkness of perdition.
When it is known that his health permits him to preach, the country
hereabouts is up in swarms, to the distance of two score miles and more.
Then, the farmer forsakes his corn-field, the chapman his shop, and every
tradesman and artizan quits his calling, to listen to the music of his
discourse. Infirmity alone has kept me from going to hear him to-day;
but my wife is no better than an infidel, and would rather listen to a
profane fidler, or a vagrant harper, than to the finest preacher that
ever breathed out a pious discourse.”
Here the little round woman retorted on her spouse, assuring Twm that he
was a miserable dreamer, whose brains had been turned by the ravings of
fanatical preachers; that some months ago he ran three miles, howling,
thinking he was pursued by the foul fiend, when it turned out to be only
his own shadow: and that when a patch of the mountain furze was set on a
blaze to fertilize the land, nothing could convince him that the world
was not on fire, and the day of judgement come, till he caught an ague by
hiding himself up to the chin in the river for twelve hours.
All this the old man very indignantly repelled, and vowed that his
courage was equal to that of any man breathing.
At this moment the violent galloping of a horse attracted their
attention, and in an instant a horse and rider passed the door, but
suddenly checking his speed he returned, and calling at the cottage door,
asking in a tone of authority if a lady had passed that way towards
Llandovery within the last half hour. The old man, trembling as he
spoke, protested that no lady had passed for many hours; on which the
bluff horseman told him as he valued his life, neither he or his wife
should appear on the outside of the cottage door, till he gave them
leave. The old man assured him of his entire obedience, when the fellow
quietly crossed the road, and effectually concealed himself and horse
behind the opposite turf-rick.
Twm, unseen himself, caught a full view of this burley horseman, and
instantly knew him. He felt a conviction that in a few minutes a scene
was to be acted, in which he was determined to perform himself a
conspicuous, if not a principal, part. He asked the timorous old
cottager if he possessed such a thing as a long-handled hedge bill-hook,
to which the poor dotard, his teeth chattering the while, replied in the
negative. On searching the cottage, with the assistance of his mistress,
to its great vexation he could find no weapon, but a blunt old hatchet,
and a rusty reaping-hook.
The canter of a light horse now struck his ear; his heart caught fire at
the sound, and with almost fierce vehemence he called to the people of
the cottage, “Give me some weapon in the name of God: to defend you and
myself from having our throats cut;” but it only increased their terror
and confusion.
In an instant, a lady on a slight white horse was opposite to the
cottage, when the horseman, darting forward from behind the turf-rick,
and producing pistols, demanded her money. The lady protested, in the
most piteous and earnest tone, that she had accidentally left her purse
behind, and must be indebted to a friend at Llandovery, should she fail
to meet her husband there, for some small change. “I’ll not be
disappointed for nothing,” cried the ruffian, “Dio the devil is not to be
fooled, and my pretty lady of Ystrad Fîn, I have depended on a good booty
from you to-day, so that unless in two minutes you strip, and give me
every article in which you are clothed, a pistol bullet shall pass
through your delicate body.”
The lady, with tears entreated him to be merciful, promising a future
recompence; but the scoundrel laughed scornfully in her face, and cocked
his pistol, on which she uttered a loud scream and fainted, when he
immediately approached to strip and rifle her.
Our hero, whose blood was boiling with honest indignation, now started up
from behind the lady’s horse, and stood on a small bank raised to
separate the cottage yard from the road, struck the highwayman an
astounding blow on the temples, with a stout hedge-stake grasped with
both hands, and repeated the violent action till it brought the desperado
senseless, and covered with blood, to the ground. After the first
terrible blow, confounded as he was, he instinctively presented his
pistol at random, but Twm struck him heavily on the extended arm, which
caused it to fall, and swing dead by his side, like a withered oak branch
smote by the thunderbolt.
The good woman of the cottage bathed the lady’s temples and soon brought
about her recovery; and great was her surprize and satisfaction to
witness the result of our hero’s courage and dexterity. While tears of
gratitude suffused her beautiful eyes, and ran down her bright ruddy
face, Twm in the gentlest manner assured her of her entire safety, and
that he would have the happiness of conducting and protecting her to
Llandovery, where he intended to bring the highwayman dead or alive, and
deliver him, with an account of the whole affair, to the magistrates.
The lady of Ystrad Fîn, smiling as she spoke, uttered many expressions of
her gratitude, and admiration of his courage, assuring him that her
husband, Sir George Devereux, would not allow him to go unrewarded for
such a signal piece of service: “but for my own part,” continued she, “as
I truly assured the merciless highwayman, I am at present without my
purse, having left it accidentally at the house of a poor sick person,
whom I visited, relieved, and stayed with, many hours this morning, by
which I have missed hearing the sermon preached to-day by the rev. Rhys
Prichard.” Twm declared he did not in the least feel himself entitled to
any reward, sufficient for him was the approval of so beautiful and
amiable a lady; but that he had another gratification in the action he
had performed, as it was his fortune to have punished the very man who
had once stopped him on the highway and robbed him of his little all.
It was in vain that Twm summoned the old man of the cottage to assist in
placing the robber on horseback, as he had hid himself beneath the bed,
roaring all the while “Oh lord! oh dear! I shall surely have my throat
cut.” The lady of Ystrad Fîn, however, alighted and lent an active hand
in binding the thief, still insensible, with old halters contributed by
the fat woman of the cottage, who also gave all possible assistance; so
that with their united aid Twm soon got him across his own horse, like a
sack of barley, and secured him by tying him neck and heels under the
horse’s belly. Our elated hero leaped into the saddle, and rode side by
side with the lady of Ystrad Fîn, and conversing freely with her,
unincumbered with his former bashfulness, till they reached Llandovery.
They entered the town just as the sermon was over, and the dense swarm,
as they issued from Llandingad church, stopped and gazed with
astonishment at the sight presented to them. At the same instant that
Sir George Devereux came up and assisted his lady to alight, Mr. Rhys the
curate approached Twm, and each in a few minutes was in possession of the
whole story. The baronet eagerly grasped our hero by the hand, and
assured him of his protection and favor to the utmost of his power;
declaring at the same time that no possible reward could equal his
deserts or repay his services.
As soon as it was known among the farmers that the terrible Dio the
devil, who had robbed many of them at different times, was captured, a
subscription was immediately raised, to reward the captor; so that our
hero was soon in possession of a sum little less than ten pounds, in
addition to five more that the county awarded for the taking of a
highwayman.
Sir George and his lady invited our hero and Mr. Rhys to dine with them
the next day at Ystrad Fîn, where the baronet said they would discuss in
what manner he could repay the services of the brave deliverer of his
lady.
The constables were now called to bring their hand-cuffs, and take
possession of the robber, but in vain;—for when he was uncorded and taken
from the horse, it was discovered he was dead.