Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth

at the eye of

man ports an

har

reflection on the quality and flavour of the prey he has eaten, or the picturesqueness of his cabin. Till then his estimate of things is qua

omestic and social life. Not in truth that we had returned to barbarism: but who could dilate on the beauty of mountain scenery, in sight of which he was perhaps to s

choice of corners in a workhouse or casual-ward. Some of our party tasted the painful pleasures of the poor in the scant accommodation and naked simplicity of cottage lodgings. It was long after our arrival that we discovered a valued friend still sitting on the corner of his packing-case, and brewing his coffee on a wa

arters, and pondered regretfully on the peace and roominess of home. Still as we are leaving no one houseless

two to three miles. This plain, a dead level stretch of peat, of which part is coming under cultivation, while part is still marsh, is surrounded by a ring of h

nce collocations, tall and low, thatched and slated together. Two or three gigantesque meeting-houses, featureless and sombre, domineer over the roofs around them. One or two others of a less puritan design, and not out of character with the church on a knoll a furlong off, compensate their severer rivals. The shape of the village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth, perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony, unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th o

ght be taken for rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it, perhaps, the suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost Lowland Hundred. Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly descried stretching far out to sea

lled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a bette

lls enclose the scene in a half-circle, of which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn. But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude-loving creatures native to the place-plover and duck and long