After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery
boulders and rugged rocks, crossing swollen torrent-beds, amid rain
and ice and snow and mist such as frightened away the Welsh
themselves--after thus wandering, because I could not leave the
region, it was a comfort to me to turn into the low, black-beamed
room of the fishing-inn, with drying hams, flitches of bacon, and
fishing-rods for decorations, and hear the simple-hearted Cymric folk
talking, sometimes in Welsh, sometimes in English, but always with
that kindness and that courtesy which go to make the poetry of Welsh
common life.
Meantime, I had, as I need scarcely say, spared neither trouble nor
expense in advertising for information about Winifred in the Welsh
and the West of England newspapers. I offered rewards for her
discovery, and the result was merely that I was pestered by letters
from people (some of them tourists of education) suggesting traces
and clues of so wild, and often of so fantastic a kind, that I
arrived at the conviction that of all man's faculties his imagination
is the most lawless, and at the same time the most powerful.
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