s it weed, or fish, or floating hair--
A tress o' golden hair,
O' drown'ed maiden's hair,
Above the nets at sea?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair,
Among the stakes on Dee.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel, crawling foam,
The cruel, hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea;
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home,
Across the Sands o' Dee.

Charles Kingsley and the poem become nearer and dearer to us than ever
with the knowledge that he was a cousin of Grenfell, and knew the
Sands o' Dee, over which Grenfell tramped and hunted as a boy, for the
sandy plain was close by his father's house.

There was a time when the estuary was a wide deep harbor, and really a
part of Liverpool Bay, and great ships from all over the world came
into it and sailed up to Chester, which in those days was a famous
port. But as years passed the sands, loosened by floods and carried
down by the river current, choked and blocked the harbor, and before
Grenfell was born it had become so shallow that only fishing vessels
and small craft could use it.

Parkgate is on the northern side of the River Dee. On the southern
side and beyond the Sands of Dee, rise the green hills of Wales,
melting away into blue mysterious distance. Near as Wales is the
people over there speak a different tongue from the English, and to
young Grenfell and his companions it was a strange and foreign land
and the people a strange and mysterious people. We have most of us,
in our young days perhaps, thought that all Welshmen were like Taffy,
of whom Mother Goose sings:

"Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,
Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef;
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy wasn't home,
Taffy came to my house and stole a marrow bone;
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy was in bed,
I took the marrow-bone, and beat about his head."

But it was Grenfell's privilege, living so near, to make little visits
over into Wales, and he early had an opportunity to learn that Taffy
was not in the least like Welshmen. He found them fine, honest,
kind-hearted folk, with no more Taffys among them than there are among
the English or Americans. The great Lloyd George, perhaps the greatest
of living statesmen, is a Welshman, and by him and not by Taffy, we
are now measuring the worth of this people who were the near neighbors
of Grenfell in hi