moats, part of the water by some
mechanical means having been forced up the eminence. On the top of this
hill or monticle in a timber house dwelt the great Welshman Owen
Glendower, with his wife, a comely, kindly woman, and his progeny,
consisting of stout boys and blooming girls, and there, though
wonderfully cramped for want of room, he feasted bards who requited his
hospitality with alliterative odes very difficult to compose, and which
at the present day only a few book-worms understand. There he dwelt for
many years, the virtual if not the nominal king of North Wales,
occasionally no doubt looking down with self-complaisance from the top of
his fastness on the parks and fish-ponds of which he had several; his
mill, his pigeon tower, his ploughed lands, and the cottages of a
thousand retainers, huddled round the lower part of the hill, or strewn
about the valley; and there he might have lived and died had not events
caused him to draw the sword and engage in a war, at the termination of
which Sycharth was a fire-scathed ruin, and himself a broken-hearted old
man in anchorite's weeds, living in a cave on the estate of Sir John
Scudamore, the great Herefordshire proprietor, who married his daughter
Elen, his only surviving child.

After I had been a considerable time on the hill looking about me and
asking questions of my guide, I took out a piece of silver and offered it
to him, thanking him at the same time for the trouble he had taken in
showing me the place. He refused it, saying that I was quite welcome.

I tried to force it upon him.

"I will not take it," said he; "but if you come to my house and have a
cup of coffee, you may give sixpence to my old woman."

"I will come," said I, "in a short time. In the meanwhile do you go; I
wish to be alone."

"What do you want to do?"

"To sit down and endeavour to recall Glendower, and the times that are
past."

The fine fellow looked puzzled; at last he said, "Very well," shrugged
his shoulders, and descended the hill.

When he was gone I sat down on the brow of the hill, and with my face
turned to the east began slowly to chant a translation made by myself in
the days of my boyhood of an ode to Sycharth composed by Iolo Goch when
upwards of a hundred years old, shortly after his arrival at that place,
to which he had been invited by Owen Glendower:--

Twice have I pledg'd my word to thee
To come thy noble face to see;
His promises let every m