It was half-past nine o’clock when Griffith Roberts led his now speechless prey up to the tiny plateau whereon were a large cairn of stones, two men, and two squalid wooden shanties.
“Ze taap,” observed Griffith Roberts, coldly.
A solitary candle struggled with the obscurity as we stumbled through a narrow door into the shanty indicated to us. It illuminated principally the features of a young gentleman in a check ulster and a Tam o’ Shanter cap, who sat behind it with a note-book and pencil and an indefinite air of being connected with the Press, and his eye-glasses flashed upon us with almost awful inquiry as the light caught them beneath the dashing tilt of his cap. The next most immediate impression was of the cabin of a fifth-rate coasting steamer: dingy wooden walls, a bare seat running round them, two tables, three cramped doorways, and a pigmy stove. That was the sum-total of the surroundings; but the fact that there was a fire in the stove crowded out all deficiencies for the first ten minutes.
The cold was clinging, inescapable, unbelieveable, at least for people who had come sweltering up in light attire from a world where it was midsummer and behaved as such. The opening of the stove was about as large as the lens of a Kodak, and might have heated us through if moved up and down our persons, as a painter burns old paint off with a brazier. Failing this, we had to reverse the process, and rotate endlessly before that single, sullen glow, while from the corner the twin malignity of the double eye-glasses blazed upon us.
“I thought I was goin’ to be all alone up here to-night,” said a voice from behind the eye-glasses--a voice of that class which, like Scott’s poetry, “scorns to be obscure,” and proclaims its natal Brixton in clarion tones. “I’ve bin kicking my ’eels up ’ere since five o’clock, and I cawn’t say it’s bin lively!” The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn, followed by a giggle of
[Illustration: “_The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn._”]
incipient boon-companionship, but the conversation was not given time to expand with the luxuriance of which it was doubtless capable. The door of the cabin was opened, and Griffith Roberts stood without, waiting for his lawful five shillings, and, subsequently, the price of a drink (which, in deference to our possible scruples, was entitled “ginger-beer”). We bade him good-bye without a pang. He is a good man, and would be invaluable as hare for a paper-chase; but if we ever ascend Snowdon again--which Heaven forfend--it will not be under his guidance.