Wild Wales | Page 7

whole very respectable. I wished at first to persuade
him to give me lessons in the office, but could not succeed: "No, no,
lad;" said he, "catch me going in there: I would just as soon venture
into a nest of porcupines." To translate from books I had already, to a
certain degree, taught myself, and at his first visit I discovered, and he
himself acknowledged, that at book Welsh I was stronger than himself,
but I learnt Welsh pronunciation from him, and to discourse a little in
the Welsh tongue. "Had you much difficulty in acquiring the sound of

the ll?" I think I hear the reader inquire. None whatever: the double l of
the Welsh is by no means the terrible guttural which English people
generally suppose it to be, being in reality a pretty liquid, exactly
resembling in sound the Spanish ll, the sound of which I had mastered
before commencing Welsh, and which is equivalent to the English lh;
so being able to pronounce llano I had of course no difficulty in
pronouncing Lluyd, which by-the-bye was the name of the groom.
I remember that I found the pronunciation of the Welsh far less difficult
than I had found the grammar, the most remarkable feature of which is
the mutation, under certain circumstances, of particular consonants,
when forming the initials of words. This feature I had observed in the
Irish, which I had then only learnt by ear.
But to return to the groom. He was really a remarkable character, and
taught me two or three things besides Welsh pronunciation; and to
discourse a little in Cumraeg. He had been a soldier in his youth, and
had served under Moore and Wellington in the Peninsular campaigns,
and from him I learnt the details of many a bloody field and bloodier
storm, of the sufferings of poor British soldiers, and the tyranny of
haughty British officers; more especially of the two commanders just
mentioned, the first of whom he swore was shot by his own soldiers,
and the second more frequently shot at by British than French. But it is
not deemed a matter of good taste to write about such low people as
grooms, I shall therefore dismiss him with no observation further than
that after he had visited me on Sunday afternoons for about a year he
departed for his own country with his wife, who was an Englishwoman,
and his children, in consequence of having been left a small freehold
there by a distant relation, and that I neither saw nor heard of him
again.
But though I had lost my oral instructor I had still my silent ones,
namely, the Welsh books, and of these I made such use that before the
expiration of my clerkship I was able to read not only Welsh prose, but,
what was infinitely more difficult, Welsh poetry in any of the
four-and-twenty measures, and was well versed in the compositions of
various of the old Welsh bards, especially those of Dafydd ab Gwilym,

whom, since the time when I first became acquainted with his works, I
have always considered as the greatest poetical genius that has
appeared in Europe since the revival of literature.
After this exordium I think I may proceed to narrate the journey of
myself and family into Wales. As perhaps, however, it will be thought
that, though I have said quite enough about myself and a certain groom,
I have not said quite enough about my wife and daughter, I will add a
little more about them. Of my wife I will merely say that she is a
perfect paragon of wives - can make puddings and sweets and treacle
posset, and is the best woman of business in Eastern Anglia - of my
step-daughter - for such she is, though I generally call her daughter, and
with good reason, seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter
to me - that she has all kinds of good qualities, and several
accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany,
drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on
the guitar - not the trumpery German thing so-called - but the real
Spanish guitar.

CHAPTER II
The Starting - Peterborough Cathedral - Anglo-Saxon Names - Kaempe
Viser - Steam - Norman Barons - Chester Ale - Sion Tudor - Pretty
Welsh Tongue.
SO our little family, consisting of myself, my wife Mary, and my
daughter Henrietta, for daughter I shall persist in calling her, started for
Wales in the afternoon of the 27th July, 1854. We flew through part of
Norfolk and Cambridgeshire in a train which we left at Ely, and getting
into another, which did not fly quite so fast as the one we had quieted,
reached the Peterborough station