420 Saddle and Sirloin. 



tain sides, but they are generally clothed with larch 

 against the west winds, which are very fierce for nine 

 months in the year. To the right are the slate works, 

 looking like great bastions of rubble with steel blue 

 terraces of slate rock. There are millions of tons of 

 rubble at the tip head, and the arsenic galleries seem 

 like hermitages in the rock. The rubble has buried, 

 lava-fashion, the old church of Starns, but his lordship 

 has built a new one in lieu of it higher up the moun- 

 tain. There are others in the neighbouring town of 

 Bethesda, beyond which we come to the Vale of Nant 

 Franckon, where the tup never leaves the ewes, and 

 the gimmer is always a nursing mother. But " Nature 

 is a holy thing ;" they are titled roamers, and there is 

 not much restitution. Jones, own brother to Owen 

 (seeing that the eldest son often takes the father's, and 

 the second the mother's name), hunts them with dogs 

 upon the mountains, and gets them back with their 

 necks and half their bodies peeled. Above us is the 

 Idwal Lake, with its dark legend that birds will not 

 fly over it. In it are the one-eyed trout, which being 

 interpreted are trout too quick for men with two eyes. 

 Then there are goats, white, with blue necks and spots, 

 waiting to be milked. A solitary man is doing his 

 bush-harrowing, with furzes bound in a gate (which he 

 has taken off for the purpose), and top-dressing with 

 the road dung he has gathered in his barrow. A 

 cormorant, with his crop full from his valley stream 

 fishing, sails off aloft to his lake, and it gets a great- 

 coat colder as we near Capel Curig, and face Snowdon 

 at last. 



The North Wales sheep are generally white in the 

 face and legs, and the ewes have scarcely any horn. 

 The flocks number from 50 to 500 ewes, and some of 

 them are still larger. Very little care has been taken 

 to select proper tups ; bad ones reign on from year to 

 year, and a progenies vitiosior follows in male tail. 

 The hoggs are mostly brought to the low grounds in 



