It was quite a common thing in Wales, as it is in Ireland to this day, for the pigs to wander over the farm, or out in the roads, poking their snouts into the proprietor's kitchen as a matter of course, and making free with root-crops meant for human beings. But as it happened that Mrs. Edwards and Evan had experience of a better state of things, they were agreed as to its adoption.
Consequently, at the beginning of the week, William, who had begun to follow Evan about like a small shadow, was delighted to watch him and Lewis clear away a large space among the outbuildings, and Robert Jones came two or three times with loads of rough stones from a local quarry, which his two patient beasts drew on the singular sleds or sledges that did duty for wheeled carts in those mountain regions.
But it was the process of piling and fitting these loose and shapeless stones on one another, so as to bind together in a firm and compact wall without cement, that kept William dancing with excitement unfelt by either passive Davy or Jonet, to whom a stitch more or less in their knitting appeared of vastly more importance than the raising of a common wall. It might suit William to caper about, or to stagger under a voluntary load of stone, and fancy he was helping, it did not much interest them.
Yet these children were no blinder than the world at large to 'the day of small things.'
But when they noticed the rising walls shaping into two adjoining square enclosures with little doorways, across which he placed long, flat pieces of wood to support the upper courses of stone, and beheld a conical roof rise over each in genuine Welsh form, and learned that the two small houses were for the pigs to live in, Davy himself set up an exclamation of surprise, as Rhys had done before him. And, no doubt, Evan would have been equally surprised had he been told that the beehive form was as ancient as the habitations of those early British ancestors who fled to the Cambrian mountains for refuge from the Roman and Saxon invaders.
Astonishment was exhausted when Williams, the Eglwysilan carpenter, on the Wednesday, brought a couple of stout wooden troughs and gates, for by that time each conical sty had been supplied with a small walled forecourt of its own, and Evan had covered the earthen floors with a thick carpet of dry fern for the pigs to lie upon. And whilst the man was at work fixing up the gates, he made a broom of ling, and began scrubbing the dirty old sow vigorously, to make her fit for her clean abode. The pigs grunted and the children laughed. So did Williams, the carpenter, to whom pig-scrubbing was a novelty. And so did Rhys, who came up the yard at the time, his lip curling with fine scorn.