frog in the
fable, it had burst in the vain attempt to rival its majestic neighbour.
At one end stood a large hotel with a small business, and an empty
billiard-room; at the other, a wall six inches high marked the spot
where subscription-rooms were to be built for the accommodation of
visitors and the public generally, as set forth in the prospectus, as
soon as the visitors and the public chose to find the money. Nearly the
whole of the village was the property of a gentleman who had built
the hotel and billiard-room, and run up a few lodging-houses on a
speculation, which seemed at best a doubtful one, of making it in time
a fashionable watering-place.

Glyndewi had been recommended to us as a quiet place. It was
quiet--horribly quiet. Not the quiet of green fields and deep woods,
the charm of country life; but the quiet of a teetotal supper-party,
or a college in vacation. "Just the place for reading: no gaiety--no
temptations." So I had written to tell the governor, in the ardour of my
setting forth as one of a "reading-party:" alas! it was a fatal mistake.
Had it been an ordinarily cheerful place, I think one or two of us could
and would have read there; as it was, our whole wits were set to work to
enliven its dulness. It took us as long to invent an amusement, as would
have sufficed elsewhere for getting tired of half-a-dozen different
dissipations. The very reason which made us fix upon it as a place to
read in, proved in our case the source of unmitigated idleness. "No
temptations," indeed! there were no temptations--the only temptation I
felt there was to hang or drown myself, and there was not a tree six
feet high within as many miles, and the Dewi was a river "darkly,
deeply, beautifully"--muddy; it would have been smothering rather. We
should not have staid to the end of the first month, had it not been for
very shame; but to run away from a reading-party would have been a joke
against us for ever. So from the time we got up in the morning, until
we climbed Mrs Jenkins's domestic tread-mill again at night, the one
question was, what should we do with ourselves? Walk? there were the
A---- and B---- roads--three miles of sand and dust either way. Before
us was the bay--behind the ----shire mountains, up which one might walk
some sixteen miles (in the month of July), and get the same view from
each successive point you reached: viz., a hill before you, which you
thought must be the top at last, and Glyndewi--