The Argosy — page 227: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

210 Among the Welsh. On the slopes of the hills were a few houses, and blue smoke went curling upwards amongst the trees, with a picturesque effect which adds so much and so strangely to all scenery. Here the scene was undoubtedly beautiful and ronyantic, and seemed to find its culminating point at Llanrwst, the station this side Bettws-y-Coed. You feel that here you are really and truly in Wales, amidst charms of which one has heard so much. Rhyl or Llandudno, when all is said and done, might belong to England or any other country, but up the Conway Valley and at Llanwrst, you are fast becoming decidedly Welsh. If nothing else betrayed the fact, the very names of the stations would tell you that, if not in Siberia or China, you must be in Wales. The extraordinary combination of letters, which allows one vowel to about every twelve consonants, and not always that, can be nothing at all approaching English. But the most startling name was that of a village in Anglesea with fifty- two letters in it and apparently only two vowels amongst them all. I spare the reader the infliction. So Llanrwst, reposing in a luxuriance of verdure and foliage nothing less than enchanting, we felt was decidedly Welsh. The disposition of the hills and their forms made the spot singularly romantic as well as beautiful. There was space, too, in which to breathe freely. You were not crushed and overweighted by the hills, and all the sky was not eclipsed by them, nor all the sunshine. In this respect, Llanwrst has the advantage over Bettws-y-Coed. With all its reputation, the latter is too cabined, cribbed, confined. You feel that it is lovely, and yet, in a sense, cannot get at the loveliness; cannot see the wood for the trees, or the sky for the hills; and the hills seem to be very much in each other’s way. It has scarcely any perspective, look which way you will. Yet when the train reached Bettws-y-Coed it was impossible not to bow down before this favoured spot. And perhaps from the railway- station you have a finer and freer view than from any other part of the little place. Bettws-y-Coed is, in its way, an Eden; a bower of roses, where nightingales ought to sing if they do not. On first arriving, you are impressed with the surrounding hills, all independent of each other, and forming, as it were, distinct chains, and which seem to have conspired to shut out Bettws-y-Coed from the world. So secluded is it that one wonders by whom it was first discovered. Undoubtedly by a pair of foolish lovers, who, for the time being, dwelling in a pleasant fools’ paradise, were all the world to each other. An Edwin and Angelina, or Abelard and Heloise, or even a more tragically- disposed Romeo and Juliet. Whoever it might be, they discovered a “cool, sequestered glade,” though it has long since ceased to be unknown and retired. The hills are for the most part fertile and luxuriant, with a richness and abundance which is one of the charms of the place. There CORNICE LIOOKS eC)