"Rhyd Du" - The Black Ford - I Crossed The Bridge.
The
voice of the Methodist was yelling from a little chapel on my left.
I went to the door and listened: "When the sinner takes hold of
God, God takes hold of the sinner." The voice was frightfully
hoarse. I passed on: night fell fast around me, and the mountain
to the south-east, towards which I was tending, looked blackly
grand. And now I came to a milestone on which I read with
difficulty: "Three miles to Beth Gelert." The way for some time
had been upward, but now it was downward. I reached a torrent,
which coming from the north-west rushed under a bridge, over which
I passed. The torrent attended me on my right hand the whole way
to Beth Gelert. The descent now became very rapid. I passed a
pine wood on my left, and proceeded for more than two miles at a
tremendous rate. I then came to a wood - this wood was just above
Beth Gelert - proceeding in the direction of a black mountain, I
found myself amongst houses, at the bottom of a valley. I passed
over a bridge, and inquiring of some people whom I met the way to
the inn, was shown an edifice brilliantly lighted up, which I
entered.
CHAPTER XLV
Inn at Beth Gelert - Delectable Company - Lieutenant P-.
THE inn or hotel at Beth Gelert was a large and commodious
building, and was anything but thronged with company; what company,
however, there was, was disagreeable enough, perhaps more so than
that in which I had been the preceding evening, which was composed
of the scum of Manchester and Liverpool; the company amongst which
I now was, consisted of seven or eight individuals, two of them
were military puppies, one a tallish fellow, who though evidently
upwards of thirty, affected the airs of a languishing girl, and
would fain have made people believe that he was dying of ENNUI and
lassitude. The other was a short spuddy fellow, with a broad ugly
face and with spectacles on his nose, who talked very
consequentially about "the service" and all that, but whose tone of
voice was coarse and his manner that of an under-bred person; then
there was an old fellow about sixty-five, a civilian, with a red
carbuncled face; he was father of the spuddy military puppy, on
whom he occasionally cast eyes of pride and almost adoration, and
whose sayings he much applauded, especially certain DOUBLES
ENTENDRES, to call them by no harsher term, directed to a fat girl,
weighing some fifteen stone, who officiated in the coffee-room as
waiter. Then there was a creature to do justice to whose
appearance would require the pencil of a Hogarth. He was about
five feet three inches and a quarter high, and might have weighed,
always provided a stone weight had been attached to him, about half
as much as the fat girl. His countenance was cadaverous and was
eternally agitated by something between a grin and a simper.
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