ABSTRACT
The June of 18— had been glorious and sunny, and full of flowers; but July came in with pouring rain, and it was a gloomy time for travellers and for weather-bound tourists, who lounged away the days in touching up sketches, dressing flies, and reading over again for the twentieth time the few volumes they had brought with them. A number of the Times, five days old, had been in constant demand, in all the sitting-rooms of a certain inn in a little mountain village of North Wales, 28 through a long July morning. The valleys around were filled with thick cold mist, which had crept up the hillsides till the hamlet itself was folded in its white dense curtain, and from the inn windows nothing was seen of the beautiful scenery around. The tourists who thronged the rooms might as well have been ‘wi’ their dear little bairnies at hame;’ and so some of them seemed to think, as they stood, with their faces flattened against the windowpanes, looking abroad in search of an event to fill up the dreary time. How many dinners were hastened that day, by way of getting through the morning, let the poor Welsh kitchen-maid say! The very village children kept in-doors; or if one or two more adventurous stole out into the land of temptation and puddles, they were soon clutched back by angry and busy mothers.
