listening with intense interest to a pale, dark man, who stood on the
front of the platform at the bottom of the field, and with sonorous
voice delivered a short opening prayer, followed by an impassioned
address. In the clear, pure air every word was distinctly heard all
over the field, the surging multitude keeping a breathless silence,
broken only by the singing of the birds or the call of the seagulls.
Sometimes a baby would send up a little wail of fatigue; but generally
the slumberous air soothed and quieted them into sleep.

The prayer over, the preacher gave out the words of a well-known hymn,
and with one accord the people stood up, and from those hundreds and
thousands arose the swelling tones of one of those old hymns which lay
hold of every Welshman's heart, its strange reminiscences, its
mysterious influences swaying his whole being, and carrying him away on
the wings of its rising and falling melody. His fathers and
grandfathers sang it in their old thatched cabins--and, farther back,
the warriors and bards of his past ancestry breathed the same
tones--and, farther back still, the wind swept its first suggestions
through the old oaks of the early solitudes.

"Is it this, I wonder, this far-reaching into the past, which gives
such moving power to the tones of an old Welsh hymn?" Thus Cardo
mused, as he sat on the hedge in the spring sunshine, his eyes roaming
over the dense throng now settling down to listen to the sermon, which
the preacher was beginning in low, slow sentences. Every ear was
strained to listen, every eye was fixed on the preacher, but Cardo
could not help wondering where Valmai was. He saw Essec Powell with
clasped fingers and upturned chin listening in rapt attention; he saw
in the rows nearest the platform many of the wives and daughters of its
occupants. Here surely would be the place for the minister's niece;