CLEAR WATERS 



the shattered relics of old border wars ; while almost 

 every hill and hollow has its story, sometimes half-told 

 by its mellifluous Cymric name. 



But it would be no use writing a book merely about 

 Breconshire. Its name would convey nothing. Very 

 few people outside Wales know where it is. It has 

 never been boomed by popular novelists or poets. 

 They know nothing about it. This is very satis- 

 factory, and I hope it will long remain so. On the 

 iron coast of Pembroke, again, for some fifty miles 

 very much resembling the opposite sea-front of 

 Cornwall, no stranger to speak of beyond Tenby, just 

 at the near edge of it, or a few pilgrims to St. David's, 

 is ever seen. In Cornwall, on the other hand, amply 

 equipped for thousands of tourists, I believe it is 

 difficult in the season to get a bed ! while at least 

 once a year somebody writes a glorified guide-book 

 to the county. We are a queer people ! A voracious 

 novel-reader of cynical temperament calculated the 

 other day that forty per cent, of recent novels, directly 

 or indirectly touching country life, and written 

 mainly, of course, by people who live within the 

 London orbit, laid the scene, or the rural portions of 

 it, in Devonshire or Cornwall. And furthermore, amid 

 idyllic thatch-roofed villages, which are relatively 

 scarce in those parts, and embellished with apple- 

 faced maids, whereas the modern Devon peasant-girl 

 in the south, at any rate, is conspicuously inclined to 

 anaemia, which is not altogether surprising. Con- 

 ventionality and poverty of experience contribute, I 

 suppose, to this topographical banality. One would 

 think a sense of humour alone would turn the tap 

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