ink ye? _I_ doubt that," rejoined Lewis, not noticing his enquiry----

"_You_ may doubt what your honour pleases, but _we_ don't--no; never man
touched her _hand_ hardly, never one her lips, before--I did have it
from her mother; but as for this one she's found at last, we wish she'd
a better"----

"What's the matter with him, then?"

"Oh, nothing more than that he's poor, sir--poor; and that _we_ don't
know much about the stranger"----

"What '_we_' do you mean, while you talk of 'we'?"

"Lord bless ye, sir, why us all of this bankside, and this side Tivy,
the great family of us, she's just like _our_ little girl to us all; for
don't she have all our young ones to give 'em learning, whether the
Cardigan ladies pay for 'em or don't? And wasn't poor dear old John
Bevan the man who would lend every farmer in the parish a help in money
or any way, only for asking? So it is, you see, she has grown up among
us. This young man, though he may be old for what I know, never seeing
him in my life--you see, sir, we on this side of Tivy are like strangers
to the Cardy men, t'other side--_they_ are _Cardie's_, sure enow, _true_
ones, as the Saxon foreign folk do call us _all_ of this shire. I
wouldn't trust one of 'em t'other side, no further than I could throw
him. I'll tell ye a story"----

"Never mind. What about David?"

"Oh, ho! You know his name, then? Well, and that's all _I_ do--pretty
nigh. He lives with a woman who fostered him after his own mother died
in travail with him, they do say, who has a little house, beyond that
lump of a mountain, above all the others, we see by daylight; he has
been in England, and is a strange one for music. He owes (owns,
possesses,) a beautiful harp--_beautiful_! The Lord knows, some do say,
that's all he owes in the world, so (except) his coracle and the salmon
he takes, and what young people do give him at weddings and biddings,
where he goes to play: and what's that to keep a wife? Poor Davy
_Telynwr_! Yet, by my soul, we all say we'd rather see her his than this
foreigner gentleman's, who has almost broke her heart, they say, by
coming between her and her own dear one."

"He's _not_ come yet," muttered the other, sullenly; adding, sharply and
bitterly, "Mighty good friends you all are, to wish her married to a
beggar, a vagabond harper, rather than to a gentleman."

"Why--to be sure, sir--but vows be vows--love's love--and to tell truth,
sir," (the Welsh blood of the Cardy peas