United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
After viewing it awhile, and listening to the babble of some children who lay on the grass near by, I resumed my walk, and, meeting a Welshman in the village street, I asked him my nearest way back to Rhyl. "Dim Sassenach," said he, after a pause. How odd that an hour or two on the railway should have brought me amongst a people who speak no English!
No one bade us welcome, nor did any one offer to take our horses, from which we had alighted; and to our various inquiries, the hopeless response of "Ha niel Sassenach," was the only answer we could extract. "If I gie ye a bawbee," said he to an urchin of about ten years old, with a fragment of a tattered plaid about him, "will you understand Sassenach?"
'You shout, said a Highlander of a neighbouring clan to Evan Dhu, 'as if the Chieftain were just come to your head. 'Oh, then, it is the handsome Sassenach Duinhe-wassel, that is to be married to Lady Flora? 'That may be, or it may not be; and it is neither your matter nor mine, Gregor.
"I pelieve," said Duncan, "it was as harmonious as could pe expected, when the tae half o' the bodies were clavering Sassenach, and the t'other skirting Gaelic, like sea-maws and clackgeese before a storm.
"I'm no very sure to a thousan' or two," replied Corrichollie in his dry laconic way and with an extra big pinch; "but I'm owner of forty thousan' sheep at the lowest reckoning." Lochiel, known to the Sassenach as Mr. Cameron, M.P., is perhaps the largest living sheep-owner in Scotland. He has at least 30,000 sheep on his vast tracks of moorland on the braes of Lochaber.
The room was kitchen, parlor, and, I suppose, bedroom for the whole family; at all events, there was only the tattered curtain between us and the sleeping accommodations. The good woman either could not or would not speak a word of English, only laughing when S said, "Dim Sassenach?" but she was kind and hospitable, and found a chair for each of us.
Macdougall in my Sassenach garb and re-emerge in ten minutes outwardly a full-blown Highland chief, from the eagle's feather in my bonnet to the buckles on my brogues.
A voice within the tower called loudly: Are you up there, Mulligan? I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered. He turned towards Stephen and said: Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers. His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: Don't mope over it all day, he said.
But, strangely enough, the favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors.
They talk in this fashion: "Look at the people; travel the country north and south, and converse with them as you go. What do you find? Unity of feeling, aims, agreement of opinion on all possible subjects? Just the opposite! You find Jacob and Esau on every side struggling in the womb of their mother. The quarrel between Sassenach and Gael still goes on.
Word Of The Day