Sunday was a bright and hot day, and in the forenoon I set out on a walk,
not well knowing whither, over a very dusty road, with not a particle of
shade along its dead level. The Welsh mountains were before me, at the
distance of three or four miles,--long ridgy hills, descending pretty
abruptly upon the plain; on either side of the road, here and there, an
old whitewashed, thatched stone cottage, or a stone farm-house, with an
aspect of some antiquity. I never suffered so much before, on this side
of the water, from heat and dust, and should probably have turned back
had I not espied the round towers and walls of an old castle at some
distance before me. Having looked at a guide-book, previously to setting
out, I knew that this must be Rhyddlan Castle, about three miles from
Rhyl; so I plodded on, and by and by entered an antiquated village, on
one side of which the castle stood. This Welsh village is very much like
the English villages, with narrow streets and mean houses or cottages,
built in blocks, and here and there a larger house standing alone;
everything far more compact than in our rural villages, and with no
grassy street-margin nor trees; aged and dirty also, with dirty children
staring at the passenger, and an undue supply of mean inns; most, or many
of the men in breeches, and some of the women, especially the elder ones,
in black beaver hats. The streets were paved with round pebbles, and
looked squalid and ugly.

The children and grown people stared lazily at me as I passed, but showed
no such alert and vivacious curiosity as a community of Yankees would
have done. I turned up a street that led me to the castle, which looked
very picturesque close at hand,--more so than at a distance, because the
towers and walls have not a sufficiently broken outline against the sky.
There are several round towers at the angles of the wall very large in
their circles, built of gray stone, crumbling, ivy-grown, everything that