ap Tewdwr, claiming descent from the ancient Welsh Prince Cadwallader, became the husband of Queen Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. and mother of Henry VI. His position gave rise to jealousies, but he showed no desire to play the part of another Glendwr. He fought on the king's side, together with his son Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, in 1461, at Mortimer's Cross; and there he was defeated by the Earl of March, who executed him at Hereford, while his son escaped. Edmund, his elder son, had died some years before, leaving his earldom of Richmond to his son Henry, the future king. Then Jasper, advanced eventually to the Dukedom of Bedford, received from his royal nephew the lordship of Glamorgan. He died childless in 1495, leaving a goodly memorial in the tower of Llandaff Cathedral, which he erected before his death, possibly to repair a part of the devastations of Glendwr.

In the story of the great civil war this district plays but little part until we come to the closing scenes of the struggle, when the tide of public opinion had turned for a while after the victory of the Parliament had been virtually secured.

The king's standard was unfurled again at Pembroke in 1648, and Chepstow also was recovered by the neighbouring Royalists. But Cromwell himself came against the insurgents. Laying siege successfully to Chepstow, he sent forward an advanced force under Colonel Horton, and these had proceeded as far as St Fagan's. The village had already figured in the history of King Charles, for he had come thither from Cardiff to meet a deputation of the Welsh, who had become disaffected in consequence of disputes

with the governor of Cardiff. It was the natural meeting - place between the hills of the Welshman's inner stronghold and the comparatively level borderland of England; and now that the troops of the Parliament had arrived thus far, the Welshmen were prepared to challenge their advance. But their efforts were fruitless, and Horton defeated them with great loss after two hours' fierce encounter. Cromwell followed, and passed on without hindrance to reduce Pembroke Castle.

The traditions of Cardiff tell that this castle also was attacked by Cromwell himself, and that he besieged it in vain till it was betrayed to him by one of the garrison. The traitor admitted a company of the enemy by a secret entrance, magnified by the legend into a subterranean passage beneath the Taff; and when he asked for a reward for his treachery, Cromwell ordered him to be hanged, that his own troops might take warning by his fate. Afterwards, it is said, the Marquis of Hertford concealed himself in a coal-ship which was returning to Cardiff from Minehead, and surprising the Parliamentary garri son, recovered the castle, and held it again for a short period on the king's side. But this was only when all hope of the Royalists' cause had finally passed away and the war was at an end.

And here our annals must find their conclusion. They have sufficiently illustrated the union of the two elements of modern development and antiquarian conservatism which go together to make up the culture of the present day, when the world has learned that the history and relics of the past form a power which may usefully be employed in the advance towards its ideal.

On the morning after their arrival at Gullyscoombe, the various members of the Bevan family, slumbering uneasily upon their unaccustomed beds, were roused from their last dreams by the noise of something which first grated heavily, and then groaned, and then rattled, and at last fell shut with a clap which shook the walls to their foundations. It was only the noise of the garden - door, which had stood closed and unused for so long that the hinges were thick with rust and the steps choked with weeds, so that it took all Lady Baby's strength to get the lazy bars to slide. The first streak of dawn had awakened her, for there were no thick curtains to her window here, as at Kippendale; and, through the silent house, she had stolen down to look out and see what Gullyscoombe was like Gullyscoombe, their place of exile. Down the nettlegrown steps she walked, shivering in the bitterly chill air, but still eager to see, eager to inspect, determined to know the worst at once. Some two hundred years ago this grim and solid little house had started in the world as the residence of one of the small Choughshire county families. A slight suggestion of moulding on the vaulted ceiling of one of the little thick walled, whitewashed rooms up-stairs, a date carved in a stone slab above one of the win. dows, and two mutilated pillars at the two sides of what was now the stable door in the yard,-these

were the marks that proclaimed the former manor - house. From that level it had sunk to be utilised as a coast - guard station; after which it had been purchased by a retired sea-captain, who had grown so used to the sound of the wind and the waves that he could not do without them, and who had fallen in love with this site presumably because it was the most exposed in England. That seacaptain must have been a happy man, for, so far as the sound of winds and waves could make it, this granite bower planted on the cliff was fit to be a merman's abode. Not a chance of remaining deaf to the tiniest ripple that broke on the rocks; not a hope of shutting out the sound of the thinnest whistle of wind which piped among the garden bushes.

The tide was out just now; and, peering over the wall, Lady Baby looked straight upon a series of wet ledges of rock,—some of them spread with a gloomy green carpet of sea-weed, or decorated with wide shining sea-weed ribbons, or heaped with thick slimy sea-weed ropes, or fringed with heavy sea-weed fringes. The very pools of salt water that still lurked on those ledges were green and brown with the tints of the sea-weeds themselves. The great round stones that lay strewn on the shingle below were tufted with tangles of sea-weed. Seen from above they might have been monstrous heads cut off and cast there, with long, wet, dishevelled hair streaming over the sand. In some of the nooks of the rocks lay

yellowish-white masses of something that shuddered in the wind so, very much as heaps of feathers would have shuddered, that Lady Baby began to wonder whether this was the place where all the sea-birds of the coast were plucked. It was only when the wind snatched up a handful of these would-be feathers and whirled them up the cliff and over her head that she perceived it to be nothing but stagnant sea-foam which had collected among the stones and lay quivering there, rank, salt, and yellow.

Turning from that side of the picture, Lady Baby looked about her in the garden; that is to say, that which had been a garden once: the path was still to be traced by the thinner growth of the weeds. About a dozen gooseberry and currant bushes stood in a straggly row. They had long ago forgotten what it was to bear fruit, and even their leaves had been eaten off them by snails much earlier in the year-brittle fragments of snailshells testified to that. In the whole waste garden there was nothing that stood higher than these wretched bushes; and even they, and even the very weeds at their feet-sea pink and samphire plants that had sown themselves there seemed to be crouching before the pruning knife of the breeze, crawling as close to the ground as they could manage, flattening themselves into corners, ducking their heads wherever a gap in the ruinous stone wall had left them unprotected. Not one of them dared to look over the highest stone; the sea-wind would not suffer it.

The four corners of the garden were marked by four battered wooden figures, which Lady Baby, after an interval of perplexity, recognised as the figure-heads of old ships. She went round and

examined them all. She had had a pretty sharp taste of misfortune within the last months, but in the bottom of her heart she was still a child, and to a real child anything in the shape of a doll has always got a mysterious fascination. Each of the figureheads was different: there was a sea-king with a sceptre, a dragon with a tail that was tied in several artistic knots, a cherub who had probably once blown a trumpet, and there was of course the unavoidable mermaid with the harp. The dragon lay on his face, the mermaid on her back, the cherub reeled against the wall; alone among them the sea-king stood upon his feet, or rather the remains of his scaly tail, still firmly embedded in the ground, and continued to wear the stump of his sceptre, as though he were still ruling the waves. At one time the other three had stood as straight as he, each in his own corner. This had been the retired sea-captain's idea of cheerful garden decoration.

Leaving this caricature of a gar den, Lady Baby pursued her investigations further. When she had walked along a little piece of the road, she met some men and women leading children by the hand, and carrying bundles on their backs. She spoke to them, and found that they were some of the miners, thrown out of work by the catastrophe, and going to look for employment elsewhere. They had been waiting on till now, in hopes from day to day that the inland vein would be struck and the new mines opened. They could not wait any longer, and they were going; many had gone already, some would follow.

Then Lady Baby slowly pursued a little path on the right; she had asked the way to the head of the

Bluebell mines, and they had The pointed in this direction. buildings were still untouched. If it had not been for the grassblades, already beginning to push themselves up among the heaps of refuse at the pit-head, the place would have looked as though only locked up for the night, and this deathly silence which hung about it might have been the stillness of a holiday, and not the dumbness of ruin. But the grass - blades were enough, and even Lady Baby, who had never heard these engines clank, and never seen the full buckets come spinning up the ropes, felt struck to the heart as she stood beside the lost mine, as though she were looking at a grave.

A little stone which she dropped down the shaft sent up a faint splash to her ear, no louder than might be the whisper of a spirit, and yet enough to remind her that the enemy was there-the patient, smiling, immeasurable sea, that had come in by one little hole, and would never, never go back again.

The

She sat down on a big stone, with her face in her hands. sight of the departing workmen had awakened in her a vague, sickening sense of hopelessness; that tiny splash in the drowned shaft seemed to set the seal upon it. What, oh what was the future to be? She was not yet eighteen; was the rest of her life to be spent on this spot? Was she to live here always, always? In this place, where the world was all made of water and of stone?

This first day at Gullyscoombe was terrible-as terrible almost as the last day at Kippendale. And yet, perhaps, it was easier to bear than the days that slowly followed, just as acute pain is less wearing than that dull throbbing ache which has become chronic.

It had been a relief to weep upon each other's necks, and there was a certain relief in the first inspection of their place of exile; but that over, what next? Reasonable beings cannot continue to weep for any length of time, be their sorrow ever so genuine, and their store of cambric handkerchiefs ever so great. The next thing was simply to sit down, to wait, to hope, and to despair a little more every day.

Men always succumb sooner than women to this sort of passive suffering, so it was no wonder that the first marks were to be seen upon the old earl. He did not complain-he was too much of a. Bevan for that-but he grew fretful; his fits of occurred anger oftener, and upon trivial provocations; his nervous habit of looking at his watch every five minutes to see when the "next thing" was due, began to grow upon him to the extent of a mania; the hand which no longer had any rein to guide seemed daily to become more unsteady, the foot which had no more cause to wear a spur now faltered and stumbled at the slightest obstacle on his path. Despite. his white hairs, he had not been an old man before this; but now his years had claimed him. There were moments also when he would seem to forget, then suddenly to remember, his ruin. When at table, for instance, the soup being singed by the unskilful cook or the vegetables overdone, he would turn to Lady Baby with "This is too bad of Mrs Spunker; what is the good of paying eighty pounds a-year to one's housekeeper unless"

and then, his eye falling on the blank faces of his daughters, he would suddenly break off and stare helplessly about him, remembering that he had no housekeeper, and that Mrs Spunker was a thing of

the past. Or once or twice, in the very earliest days of his exile, he would emerge from his newspaper with a jerk of his watch and a cheerful declaration that there would be just time for a gallop before luncheon, only to sink back into his chair with a groan, before the words were well out.

Lady Baby's first days had been devoted to the divining-rod; but her inland expeditions having been interdicted, there remained nothing but to wander about the rocks, and count the clouds and speculate whether ships from the North Sea ever passed that way. She had found out a sheltered seat among the rocks half-way down the cliff -a niche which bore some marks of artificial hollowing, and which had probably once played the part of a smuggler's hiding-hole. Right above it, on the crest of the cliff, a small irregularly oblong enclosure had first attracted her attention to this particular spot of the coast. On nearer inspection this halfobliterated enclosure was found to contain two half - obliterated mounds. They were the graves of two sailors, she was told, who had been found lying one morning, many years ago, side by side on that little bit of sand in that tiny scrap of a bay straight below. There were no names on the graves, but there was nothing very peculiar in that, seeing that nameless graves are rather more common on the Choughshire coast than graves with names. Sometimes, it is true, inquiries were made and bodies were identified; but these two sailors happened never to have been claimed, so there they lay nameless under their green mounds, and the "uncanny cliff" was generally shunned as a spot of evil repute.

It was exactly its evil reputa tion that had caused Lady Baby

to choose this particular niche in the rocks for her favoured seat. It assured her the greater loneliness. Besides, she took a dreary and almost a fearful interest in those dead sailors. Were there not many other ships afloat besides the one on which those poor nameless men had left their homes? And were not winds as high and waves as cruel to-day as they had been then?

In her daily visit to her rocky niche, Lady Baby never failed before descending the cliff to throw a scrutinising glance at the irregular enclosure on the top. So low was the enclosing bank that the hungry-looking sheep, limping with hobbled legs up and down the cliff paths, used frequently to scramble into the dismal little graveyard, under the impression, apparently, that the grass there was a trifle richer in quality, or a trifle less battered by the wind. Lady Baby was very sorry for the sheep, but she was sorrier for the sailors, and she never failed to drive off the trespassers before descending to her hidden seat. There, with Brenda and Fulda at her feet, she would sit whole afternoons staring out to sea till her eyes ached. She had a vague notion

this was in her more hopeful moods that some day the yacht Fantasca would come sailing this way and would anchor just in front of this very rock, and that just up a little ledge the yacht's master would step, to lay his fortune and his love at her feet. And then? Why, then, of course she would reject it, as every beggar-maid in her place would do, unless she were a very vile beggar-maid indeed. A great deal in her was changed, but her pride not yet; it would take a vet harder blow to bend its stubborn neck. She never for a moment wavered in her resolve to