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Perhaps the most remarkahle feature in the secluded Cwmffrwdor, and 

 which gave a most picturesque character to the dingle, was the numerous old 

 monstrous Beech trees that were scattered on its sides, scarcely indeed growing 

 there, for most of them were dead, or in the throes of decrepitude and decay 

 from whatever cause, while some rudely overthrown looked like huge pachyderms 

 of bye-gone ages left abandoned to rottenness and the gnawing tooth of time. 

 Many had lost their bark, others their branches, all were mutilated in some 

 degree ; and a visit to this deep glen by moonlight in the winter season might 

 assist the imaginative pencil of a Fuseli, or inspire descriptions of fright and 

 horror in a poet inclined to imitate some of the descriptions of Dante in his 

 "Inferno." Even Hood might have had some such narrow valley before his 

 view in one of his poems, where he says — 



" It was a wild and solitary glen, 



Made gloomy by the shade of beeches dark. 

 Whose up-turned roots like bones of bury'd men 

 Rose throiigh the rotten soil for fear's remark ; 

 A hundred horrid boles jagged and stark, 

 Struggled with crooked arms in hideous fray." 

 and even now, in leafy June, and in the blaze of day, these bleached beeches, 

 some stretching their bare bony arms in mid air, and others partially invested 

 ■with ivy, had a spectral appearance it was impossible to avoid remarking. A fine 

 specimen of the red-backed shrike, Laniiis coUurio, was seated at the end of a 

 dead bough, and flew off as the members approached.^ On leaving this secluded 

 glen and entering upon the common ways of life, a feature that is more observ- 

 able in Monmouthshire than in most other counties was evident in the great 

 quantity of the common elder (Samhucus nigra), which, now in full flower, 

 covered the hedges with its sulphur-tinted umbels. 



On either side of Cwmffrwdor was a steep tramway incline, where the 

 full waggons draw up the empty ones, and such natives as were seen had a black 

 and grimy aspect. 



In passing over the hill J. Mil ward, Esq., of Cardiff, picked up a shrew 

 mouse, Sorex araneits, lying dead in the road, without apparent injury. It is a 

 curious fact, says Dr. Bah-d, that every autumn immense numbers of these 

 little creatures (the smallest of British mammals) are found dead on our foot- 

 paths and roads. The cause of this great mortality has not been sufficiently 

 explained. The harmless little animal has much interest attached to it. It is 

 very common, but is seldom to be seen in the daytime. It burrows in banks 

 amongst the roots of trees and in brushwood. It feeds on worms and grubs, 

 for the pursuit of which, among the close herbage and on the surface of the soil, 

 its long and thin-pointed snout is admirably adapted. Cats will kill them, as 

 was probably the case with our luckless little wight, but they won't eat them, 

 though weasels, and hawks, and owls will greedily do so. 



Then, too, there is the curious old superstition with reference to the 

 shrew mouse, that it seriously injured any cattle it crept over by the mere 

 touch of its body, producing paralysis and divers other ills. The remedy for 



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