am that runs over them is
turned into a thin sheet of ice. Many, many years back--a lifetime
ago--there lived in Pen-Morfa a widow and her daughter. Very little is
required in those out-of-the-way Welsh villages. The wants of the people
are very simple. Shelter, fire, a little oat-cake and buttermilk, and
garden produce; perhaps some pork and bacon from the pig in winter;
clothing, which is principally of home manufacture, and of the most
enduring kind: these take very little money to purchase, especially in a
district into which the large capitalists have not yet come, to buy up
two or three acres of the peasants; and nearly every man about Pen-Morfa
owned, at the time of which I speak, his dwelling and some land besides.

Eleanor Gwynn inherited the cottage (by the road-side, on the left hand
as you go from Tre-Madoc to Pen-Morfa), in which she and her husband had
lived all their married life, and a small garden sloping southward, in
which her bees lingered before winging their way to the more distant
heather. She took rank among her neighbors as the possessor of a
moderate independence--not rich, and not poor. But the young men of
Pen-Morfa thought her very rich in the possession of a most lovely
daughter. Most of us know how very pretty Welsh women are; but from all
accounts, Nest Gwynn (Nest, or Nesta, is the Welsh for Agnes) was more
regularly beautiful than any one for miles around. The Welsh are still
fond of triads, and "as beautiful as a summer's morning at sun-rise, as
a white sea-gull on the green sea-wave, and as Nest Gwynn," is yet a
saying in that district. Nest knew she was beautiful, and delighted in
it. Her mother sometimes checked her in her happy pride, and sometimes
reminded her that beauty was a great gift of God (for the Welsh are a
very pious people), but when she began her little homily, Nest came
dancing to her, and knelt down before her and put her face up to be
kissed, and so with a sweet interruption she stopped her mother's lips.
Her high spirits made some few shake their heads, and some called her a
flirt and a coquette; for she could not help trying to please all, both
old and young, both men and women. A very little from Nest sufficed for
this; a sweet glittering smile, a word of kindness, a merry glance, or a
little sympathy, all these pleased and attracted; she was like the
fairy-gifted child, and dropped inestimable gifts. But some, who had
interpreted her smiles and kind words rather