The Romance of a Wayside Weed, 71 



of Ireland and the Hebrides. Tourists drivinjT from 

 Harmouth to Port Madoc have looked down from the 

 picturesque escarpment of Harlech Castle upon a 

 narrow belt of plain between the mountains and the 

 sea, and have been told how the Lowland Hundred 

 once stretched outward from this point across Cardi- 

 gan Bay as far as Sarn I5adri<j or St. Patrick's 

 Causeway, a rocky reef which whitens the Channel 

 into a long line of breakers in the middle distance. 

 Welsh legends, immortalised by Peacock's delicious 

 satire, tell us how the Hundred was submerged by an 

 inundation ; and the tradition as to this subsidence is 

 almost certainly correct. There is some ground for 

 believing that the Isle of Wight was still united at 

 ebb tide to the mainland of Hampshire by a sandy 

 isthmus, when the Romans built their villas at 

 Brading ; and we know that even as late as the days 

 when Hengcst and Horsa launched their mythical 

 long ships for the conquest of Kent, the Zuyder Zee 

 was yet undoubtedly an inland lake, separated from 

 the German Ocean by a long belt of land now almost 

 entirely submerged, save in the solitary line of islands 

 which preserves the outline q{ its northern shore. 

 Nay, even in our own time, the southern part of 

 Sweden is slowly sinking by inches beneath the level 

 of the Baltic. Hence I am strongly inclined to sus- 



