ditty.

Have you ever been to Wales? If you have ever visited the pretty, dirty, green spot where Pat and his brogue, where potatoes and absenteeism and head-centres flourish, alias Ireland, you have no doubt passed through a part of it, rushing by, most likely, in the Irish mail; but in that case your eyes and nose and ears were all so very full of dust and cinders—you were so fully employed in blinking and coughing and enjoying the poetry of motion—as to be totally incapable of seeing, hearing, or smelling any of the beauties, agreeable noises, or good smells, which in happier circumstances might have offered themselves to your notice. Perhaps you are in the habit, every midsummer, of taking your half-dozen male and female olive shoots to have the roses restored to their twelve fat cheeks by blowy scrambles about the great frowning Orme's Head, or by excavations in the Rhyl Sands. Perhaps you have gone wedding-touring to Llanberis on the top of a heavy-laden coach, swinging unsafely round sharp corners, and nearly flinging your Angelina from your side on to the hard Welsh road below. Perhaps you have wept with Angelina at the spurious grave of the martyred Gelert, or eaten pink trout voraciously at Capel Curig, and found out what a startlingly good appetite Angelina had. But have you ever lived in the land of the Cymri? Have you ever seen how drunk the masculine Cymri can be on market days, or what grievous old hags the feminine Cymri become towards their thirtieth year? Have you ever, by bitter experience, discovered the truth of that couplet—

 "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief?" 

Taffy was a thief?"

I have lived in Wales, so I speak with authority; and for my part I don't think that Taffy is much more given to the breaking of the eighth commandment than the canaille of any other country. He is not a bright fellow, is not Taffy; happiest, I think, when rather tipsy, or when yelling psalms in his conventicle or schism-shop—for Taffy is addicted to schism; he will tell you plenty of lies, too, and will not season them with the salt of a racy, devil-me-care wit, as Pat would. But he is very civil-spoken, and rather harmless; seldomer, I think, than his cleverer neighbour over the border does he hanker feloniously after his neighbour's spoons, or hammer his wife's head with the domestic poker.

But why am I drivelling on, like a sort of Murray and water, on the manners and character of this, to my thinking, not very interesting nation? I will waste no more "prave 'ords" upon them, as the few men and women whom I 

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