entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it.
This was none other than he who was to be the father of Cymry minstrelsy,
and whom then and there his rescuers named Taliesin, which means Radiant
Brow. His mother, Ceridwen, seeking to be rid of her infant, but loath
to have the child's blood on her head, had launched him in this sea proof
cradle, to take the chance of wind and wave. The spot where he came to
land bears at this day the name of Taliesin. On the hill-top above it
men show the grave where the bard reposes and "glories in his namesake
shore."

* * * * *

There is something magnetic in a famous site: it attracts again a like
history to the old stage. Thirteen centuries and a half after the
finding of Taliesin, the same shore became once again an asylum for other
outcasts, whose fortunes we propose to chronicle.

But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the
waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of
marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the
fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a
mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive
building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and
forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel,
reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous
health-resort. But the melancholy silence which haunts its doors is
rarely broken, between season and season, by the presence of guests,
unless it be some chance sportsman in quest of marsh-fowl, or a
land-agent in quest of rents.