CLEAR WATERS 



heard by the faithful amid these hills as clearly as in 

 the plains of Cardiganshire, that most aloof and most 

 Welsh of all Welsh counties. Amid the hoot of the 

 motors you may still encounter the farmers on their 

 hardy ponies jogging in little companies to market, 

 and often, too, a farmer's wife ambling down to 

 Rhayader, sometimes in peasant dress, sometimes 

 quite stylishly attired, but always basket on arm, and 

 not a bit ashamed of it, though her husband may own 

 two thousand sheep upon the hills above. 



The ancient tongue is dying hardly but surely on 

 the head-waters of the Wye. Rhayader and, indeed, 

 the whole of Radnorshire lost it completely from fifty 

 to a hundred years ago. Llangurig is just in Mont- 

 gomeryshire, and all around and above it the old and 

 the middle-aged still cling to the vernacular. But 

 * the children, alas,' said an old farmer to me, ' play 

 in Saesoneg,' and when the children begin to play in 

 English it is the beginning of the end. But this is a 

 corner with its back to a barren mountain and its face 

 to an English-speaking world, and the situation is 

 not quite typical of matters lingual. That there is no 

 generic name for this widespreading and clearly defined 

 mountain wilderness seems a scandalous oversight on 

 the part of the ancients, though no doubt a mere 

 mischance, infinitely regrettable, and a constant incon- 

 venience both in print and converse. Like a long 

 half-moon it completely shuts out the large seaboard 

 county of Cardigan from the interior. The * Cardy ' 

 simply cannot get out except at the two extremes of 

 his long shire, and is, for that and one or two other 

 reasons, a distinct type of Welshman all to himself. 

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