‘Does your honour remember anything about Durham city?’

‘Oh yes!  I remember a good deal about it.’

’Then, your honour, pray tell us what you remember about it—­pray do! perhaps it will do me good.’

’Well then, I remember that it was a fine old city standing on a hill with a river running under it, and that it had a fine old church, one of the finest in the whole of Britain; likewise a fine old castle; and last, not least, a capital old inn, where I got a capital dinner off roast Durham beef, and a capital glass of ale, which I believe was the cause of my being ever after fond of ale.’

* * * * *

I was the last of the file, but I now rushed past John Jones, who was before me, and next to the old lady, and sure enough there was the chair, in the wall, of him who was called in his day, and still is called by the mountaineers of Wales, though his body has been below the earth in the quiet churchyard one hundred and forty years, Eos Ceiriog, the Nightingale of Ceiriog, the sweet caroller Huw Morus, the enthusiastic partizan of Charles and the Church of England, and the never-tiring lampooner of Oliver and the Independents.  There it was, a kind of hollow in the stone wall, in the hen ffordd, fronting to the west, just above the gorge at the bottom of which murmurs the brook Ceiriog, there it was, something like a half barrel chair in a garden, a mouldering stone slab forming the seat, and a large slate stone, the back, on which were cut these letters—­

   H. M. B.

signifying Huw Morus Bard.

‘Sit down in the chair, Gwr Boneddig,’ said John Jones, ’you have taken trouble enough to get to it.’

‘Do, gentleman,’ said the old lady; ’but first let me wipe it with my apron, for it is very wet and dirty.’

‘Let it be,’ said I; then taking off my hat I stood uncovered before the chair, and said in the best Welsh I could command, ’Shade of Huw Morus, supposing your shade haunts the place which you loved so well when alive—­a Saxon, one of the seed of the Coiling Serpent, has come to this place to pay that respect to true genius, the Dawn Duw, which he is ever ready to pay.  He read the songs of the Nightingale of Ceiriog in the most distant part of Lloegr, when he was a brown-haired boy, and now that he is a grey-haired man he is come to say in this place that they frequently made his eyes overflow with tears of rapture.’

I then sat down in the chair, and commenced repeating verses of Huw Morus.  All which I did in the presence of the stout old lady, the short, buxom and bare-armed damsel, and of John Jones the Calvinistic weaver of Llangollen, all of whom listened patiently and approvingly, though the rain was pouring down upon them, and the branches of the trees and the tops of the tall nettles, agitated by the gusts from the mountain hollows, were beating in their faces, for enthusiasm is never scoffed at by the noble simple-minded, genuine Welsh, whatever treatment it may receive from the coarse-hearted, sensual, selfish Saxon.