after, one of the brothers explained to me that their parents had gone,
the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of Methodists, held at
Carnarvon, and were that day expected to return; "and if they should not
be so civil as they ought to be," he begged, on the part of all the young
people, that I would not take it amiss. The parents returned with
churlish faces, and "_Dym Sassenach_" (_no English_) in answer to all my
addresses. I saw how matters stood; and so, taking an affectionate leave
of my kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way; for, though they
spoke warmly to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner
of the old people by saying it was "only their way," yet I easily
understood that my talent for writing love-letters would do as little to
recommend me with two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek
sapphics or alcaics; and what had been hospitality when offered to me
with the gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity when
connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people. Certainly, Mr.
Shelley is right in his notions about old age: unless powerfully
counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies, it is a miserable
corrupter and blighter to the genial charities of the human heart.

Soon after this I contrived, by means which I must omit for want of room,
to transfer myself to London. And now began the latter and fiercer stage
of my long sufferings; without using a disproportionate expression I
might say, of my agony. For I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen
weeks, the physical anguish of hunger in. I various degrees of
intensity, but as bitter perhaps as ever any human being can have
suffered who has survived it would not needlessly harass my reader's
feelings by a detail of all that I endured; for extremities such as
these, under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be
contemplated, even in description, without a rueful pity that is painful
to the natural goodness of the human heart. Let it suffice, at least on