Page:My people stories of the peasantry of West Wales.djvu/264



of Mistress Shames. Are not the people mouthing your foolish ways on the tramping road and in Shop Rhys?” Matilda entered the kitchen, and threw these words at him: “Dull and whorish you are, son of the Bad Spirit. Serious me, clean your smelly flesh in the pond.” Hannah interpreted the meaning of Matilda’s words, and she reproached him bitterly.

But Evan answered none of the women. He went to the inn, and in his muddle he sorrowed: “Five over twenty years have I been wedded. When I took Hannah the servant of Bensha to my bed, rich was I. Did I not have six pairs of drawers, and six pairs of stockings, and six pairs of shirts of white linen? And three pairs of rib trousers? There’s rib, people bach. Ninepence over half a crown a yard it cost in the Shop of the Bridge in Castellybryn. Not a shirt of linen do I possess this day. Wasteful has Hannah been with mine.