Beggars on horseback; a riding tour in North Wales
Martin Ross
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 16, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 Excerpt: ...generally. It was therefore crushing to find on the morrow that he had unexpectedly fled at daybreak, with all his worldly possessions. He did not know it, but he was obeying the decree that, Claudian-like, we should blight the fortunes of every hotel we stayed at, and reign in malign monopoly of coffee-room and table-d'hdte. CHAPTER XI. Hitherto farewell had been slightly said, with a few backward looks of good feeling, a few civil wishes for an indefinite return. But at Bettwys, for the first time, and perhaps also because it was--of this vagrant expedition--so near the last, parting gave pain. Turning on the face of a hill we looked back over the valley and across the flitting showers to the peaks of Snowdon and Moel Siabod, a retrospect to be remembered and thirstily to be desired in other summers. Darkly and greenly the woods sank into every cleft, or rose with the piled-up landscape till the cold breast of Snowdon was half hidden behind them. A river, whose name is quite immaterial, plunged uproariously down to the five crooked arches of Pont-yPair bridge in Bettwys, then, rinding itself suddenly in good society, pulled itself together and swam tense and flat round a curve to present itself decorously to what I think we are safe in asserting to be the river Conway. It was true that half-pay generals and forlorn honeymoon couples haunted the bridge and hung round the post-office, that "well-appointed conveyances" were daily braying forth with horns the multitudinous entry of the tourist, also that the glass was falling; none the less we should thankfully have turned the Tommies down the hill again and remained without purpose or limit at Bettwys. Then, indeed, might many periods have been instructively framed around the names of the Miner's B...