against the sides, and, old as they are, they must have been built after
the whole structure was a ruin. In one place I saw the sign of an
alehouse painted on the gray stones of one of the old round towers. As
we entered one of the gates, after making the entire circuit, we saw an
omnibus coming down the street towards us, with its horn sounding.
Llandudno was its place of destination; and, knowing no more about it
than that it was four miles off, we took our seats. Llandudno is a
watering-village at the base of the Great Orme's Head, at the mouth of
the Conway River. In this omnibus there were two pleasant-looking girls,
who talked Welsh together,--a guttural, childish kind of a babble.
Afterwards we got into conversation with them, and found them very
agreeable. One of them was reading Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." On
reaching Llandudno, S----- waited at the hotel, while O'Sullivan, U----,
and I ascended the Great Orme's Head. There are copper-mines here, and
we heard of a large cave, with stalactites, but did not go so far as
that. We found the old shaft of a mine, however, and threw stones down
it, and counted twenty before we heard them strike the bottom. At the
base of the Head, on the side opposite the village, we saw a small church
with a broken roof, and horizontal gravestones of slate within the stone
enclosure around it. The view from the hill was most beautiful,--a blue
summer sea, with the distant trail of smoke from a steamer, and many
snowy sails; in another direction the mountains, near and distant, some
of them with clouds below their peaks.

We went to one of the mines which are still worked, and boys came running
to meet us with specimens of the copper ore for sale. The miners were
not now hoisting ore from the shaft, but were washing and selecting the
valuable fragments from great heaps of crumbled stone and earth. All
about this spot there are shafts and well-holes, looking fearfully deep
and black, and without the slightest protection, so that we might just as