another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former state of
the shore a suggestive phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark
there appeared certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for
rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged
pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood
can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the
tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it,
perhaps, the suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost
Lowland Hundred. Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a
flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are
now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they
creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in
the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must
once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not
indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a
little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule
the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain
it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. And
perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on
the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this
prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during
the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in
a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge
of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys
a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a
meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must
be told in its own place.

Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had
settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than