Page:My people stories of the peasantry of West Wales.djvu/80



gate of the enclosure in which Shames’s sheep spent the night. This Eben did every day till he grew out of knee-breeches into long corduroy trousers. His life was lonely; books were closed against him, because he had not been taught to read; and the sense of the beautiful or the curious in Nature is slow to awake in the mind of the Welsh peasant. After a time Eben began to hold whispered conversations with himself.

Gradually he found consolation in his voice, the sound of which fell pleasingly upon his ears. He knew many hymns by heart, and these hymns he recited to the shivering heather and the grazing sheep.

One afternoon, his legs dangling over the edge of the stone quarry, he fell asleep, and in his dream the Big Mana white-bearded, vigorous, stern, elderly giant, broad as the front of Capel Sion and taller than the roofcame to him, saying: