[Illustration: LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR]
Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other
best hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-
best we decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would
bring us nearer the native life. The best we could get, facing
the sea midway of the crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their
keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly Church-of-
England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a
novel they had read. They said they believed the name was
Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its
analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were
very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of
girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings, and were
forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest
they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were
half English, but the gentle creature who served our table was
wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who
suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but
kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with patience
and even cheerfulness.
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