We are sorry
Mr. Poplington couldn't come here with us, for he could have shown us a
great many things; but he stayed at Chedcombe to finish his fishing,
and he said he might meet us at Buxton, where he goes every year for
his arm.
To see the River Wye you must go down it, so with just one handbag we
took the train for the little town of Ross, which is near the beginning
of the navigable part of the river - I might almost say the wadeable
part, for I imagine the deepest soundings about Ross are not more than
half a yard. We stayed all night at a hotel overlooking the valley of
the little river, and as the best way to see this wonderful stream is
to go down it in a rowboat, as soon as we reached Ross we engaged a
boat and a man for the next morning to take us to Monmouth, which would
be about a day's row, and give us the best part of the river. But I
must say that when we looked out over the valley the prospect was not
very encouraging, for it seemed to me that if the sun came out hot it
would dry up that river, and Jone might not be willing to wait until
the next heavy rain.
While we was at Chedcombe I read the "Maid of Sker," because its scenes
are laid in the Bristol Channel, about the coast near where we was, and
over in Wales. And when the next morning we went down to the boat which
we was going to take our day's trip in, and I saw the man who was to
row us, David Llewellyn popped straight into my mind.
This man was elderly, with gray hair, and a beard under his chin, with
a general air of water and fish. He was good-natured and sociable from
the very beginning. It seemed a shame that an old man should row two
people so much younger than he was, but after I had looked at him
pulling at his oars for a little while, I saw that there was no need
of pitying him.
It was a good day, with only one or two drizzles in the morning, and we
had not gone far before I found that the Wye was more of a river than I
thought it was, though never any bigger than a creek. It was just about
warm enough for a boat trip, though the old man told us there had been
a "rime" that morning, which made me think of the "Ancient Mariner."
The more the boatman talked and made queer jokes, the more I wanted to
ask him his name; and I hoped he would say David Llewellyn, or at least
David, and as a sort of feeler I asked him if he had ever seen a
coracle.
