Preface As a guidebook this volume will be found to contain too few unpronounceable Welsh placenames to be adequate, but as an introduction to the North Welsh land, its customs, its village life, its little churches, its holiday possibilities, its history and associations, its folk-lore and romance, its music, its cottages and castles, GALLANT LITTLE WALES should be useful. It is my intention to follow this book with a companion volume on South Wales. I wish to express my debt to Mr. Henry Blackwell, who has always been quick to lend me volumes from his priceless Welsh library and who went over some of my manuscript for me. I am under obligations also to Rev. Gwilym O. Griffith of Carnarvonshire, North Wales. Thanks, too, I owe to Miss Dorothy Foster for her work upon the map which appears as a separate page in this volume. The English know where beauty and comfort, good care, and good Welsh mutton are to be had for a moderate tariff. But long before the Englishman went for his vacations to these British Alps and the American followed him, excursions were made into Wales. The Roman spent a summer holiday or so both in North and South Wales, and left there his villas and his fortresses and his roads. The Roman, having set or followed a good example-and who shall say which it was? and having with Roman certainty got what he wanted, departed, leaving the country open to other invaders who pillaged and plundered. Nor, since that time, has the country ever been without an invader. I, too, have gone my wonder-ways in Wales, plundering where I could. I, too, Celt and Celt again, have followed its beauty and felt a biting hunger for a land which, once loved, can never be forgotten. As did another Celt, William Morris, in his poems, so in prose this little book and I have wrought in an old garden, hoping to make "fresh flowers spring up from hoarded seed" and to bring back again -"back to folk weary"— some fragrance of old days and old deeds. Friendliness, solitude, memories, beauty for the eye and beauty for the ear, he who would have one or all of these, let him go and go again to gallant little Wales. JEANNETTE MARKS. ATTIC PEACE, May 13, 1912. |