the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys
a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a
meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must
be told in its own place.

Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had
settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than
rivalled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and
impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a better
rendering, to describe how the scene looked to the eyes of someone who
watched it on a June afternoon from the grassy slopes of Borth Head:

My eyes run on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and,
farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing
ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the
dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp
close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains
from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark
firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted gold of the
oak's young leafage. Above these, hills moulded on a grander scale
heave up their broad shoulders to the sunlight, which is reflected in
pale but tender hues of blue or violet or rose from their bare rock
masses, or the slopes hardly less bare, which are swept by great
winds, and browsed yet closer by climbing mountain sheep. At this and
the other point the bosses of the hills are lighted with the sparkle
of gorse-thickets, or dusky with heather not yet kindled into bloom.
Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which
strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes
above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of
white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so,
ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of
which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn.
But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land
between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant
and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness
the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of
various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents
somet