CLEAR WATERS 



even if it were all or anything like aU, to save the 

 character of a sheet of water that is hardly twice as 

 far from London as the Norfolk Broads ! Out of 

 these wild hills and moors that mass themselves 

 behind the head of Bala lake, as do other moors 

 and mountains farther back, and less obviously, to 

 the north and south of it, come leaping many 

 impetuous streams ; notably three, of which the 

 smallest and the middle one holds the honours, and 

 with piping voice proclaims itself the Dyfrdwy, other- 

 wise the sacred Dee. 



Why it should be so I know not, for both the others 

 to the north and south respectively, the Twrch and 

 the Lliw, are quite sizeable fishing streams, while the 

 Dyfrdwy is something less than that. The habitual 

 traveller to Barmouth or Dolgelly knows it well, if 

 not its import, as the train climbs up the lonely pass 

 towards the seacoast watershed, for as a brown peaty 

 brook, playing among the mosses, the bogs, the rocks, 

 the alders, and the birches, it twists in and out of the 

 line till somewhere in the bosky foreground it dis- 

 appears from sight and mind. And if the traveller 

 cranes his neck a Httle and knows when to look up, he 

 will see for a moment or two the crest of Arran Benllyn, 

 with a patch of snow in most months upon its northern 

 tip. It is not for nothing that the infant Dee comes 

 breaking out from its foot, since it is this sombre birth- 

 place that made the great river below sacred in the 

 eyes of the men of old and in the ears of poets of all 

 ages. For here, following tradition, Spenser places the 

 scene of young King Arthur's upbringing by Timon, 

 his foster father. 



46 



