ly 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 gayety--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 should 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 treadmill 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 yet 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--of which we knew the
number of houses, and the number of windows in each--behind. Ride then?
the two hacks kept by mine host of the Mynysnewydd Arms, deserve a
history to themselves. Rossinante would have been ashamed to be seen
grazing in the same field with such caricatures of his race. There was a
board upon a house a few doors off, announcing that "pleasure and other
boats" were to be let on hire. All the boats that