presently illuminating that day with a ghastly, momentary light,
brilliant even beyond its own?

CHAPTER II.

Llaneol, the dilapidated farm-house of the expelled steward, old Bevan,
stood beautifully in a wooded glen, watered by a shallow stream, between
a brook and river in size. A pretty greensward, of perpetual vivid hue,
stretched quite up to the threshold--its "fold," or farm-yard, being
small, and situated behind. A wooded mountain rose opposite, topped by a
range of many-tinted cliffs, splintered like thunder-stricken
battlements, and resembling, in their fretted and timeworn fronts, rich
cathedral architecture in ruins. Extensive sheep-walks rose in russet,
lofty barrenness behind, but allowing below breadth for venerable oaks,
and a profusion of underwood, to shelter the white, but no longer
well-thatched, farm-cottage, and screening that umbrageous valley from
the colder wind; while the many sheep, seen, and but just seen, dotting
the lofty barrier, beautified the scene by the pastoral ideas which
their dim-seen white inspired. Only the songs of birds distinguished the
noonday from the night, unless when the flail was heard in the barn,
through the open doors of which, coloured by mosses, the river
glistened, and the green, with its geese, gleamed the more picturesquely
for this rustic perspective.

As Winifred was approaching this tranquil vale--her native vale--after
an absence at the town of Cardigan, where she had been seeking
assistance for her father, with little success, she was startled by the
unusual sound of many voices, and soon saw, aghast, the whole of the
rustic furniture standing about on the pretty green, her infant
play-place; the noisy auctioneer mounted on the well-known old oaken
table; even her mother's wheel was already knocked down and sold, and
her father's own great wicker chair was ready to be put up, while rude
boys were trying its rickety antiquity by a furious rocking.

On no occasion is so much joviality indulged (in Wales) as on that of an
auction "under a distress for rent," (which was the case here)--an
occasion of calamity and ruin to the owner. Even in the event of an
auction caused by a death, where the common course of nature has removed
the possessor from those "goods and chattels" which are now useless to
him, a sale is surely a melancholy spectacle to creatures who use their
minds, and possess feelings befitting a brotherhood of Christians, or
even heathens. To see