table d’hote was going on when I arrived,
and I joined it. Save myself, the guests were,
I think, landscape painters to a man. They had
been sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought
I had never met so genial and good-natured a set of
men, and I have since often wondered what they thought
of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances
as they made towards me in a temper that must have
seemed to them morose or churlish and stupid.
Before the dinner was over another tourist entered—a
fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles,
who, sitting next to me, did at length, by force of
sheer good-humour, contrive to get into a desultory
kind of conversation with me, and, as far as I remember,
he talked well. He was not an artist, I found,
but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby
was not like that fatal antiquarianism of my father’s,
which had worked so much mischief, but the harmless
quest of flint implements. His talk about his
collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to
Flinty Point and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built
walls of Raxton church. After dinner, coffee,
liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the dining-room,
I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel
till bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in
torrents. I was compelled to return to my friend
of the ‘flints.’ At that moment one
of the artists plunged into a comic song, and by the
ecstatic look of the company I knew that a purgatorial
time was before me. I resigned myself to my fate.
Song followed song, until at last even my friend of
the flints struck up the ballad of
Little Billee,
whose lugubrious refrain seemed to ‘set the
table in a roar’; but to me it will always be
associated with sickening heartache.
As soon as the rain ceased I left the hotel and went
to the room in the little town the landlord had engaged
for me. There, with the roar in my ears of the
mountain streams (swollen by the rains), I went to
bed and, strange to say, slept.
Next morning I rose early, breakfasted at ‘The
Royal Oak’ as soon as I could get attended to,
and proceeded in the direction in which, according
to what I had gathered from various sources, Mrs. Davies
had lived. This led me through a valley and by
the side of a stream, whose cascades I succeeded,
after many efforts, in crossing. After a while,
however, I found that I had taken a wrong track, and
was soon walking in the contrary direction. I
will not describe that long dreary walk in a drenching
rain, with nothing but the base of the mountain visible,
all else being lost in clouds and mist.