The streets were paved with round pebbles, and
looked squalid and ugly.
The children and grown people stared lazily at me as I passed, but showed
no such alert and vivacious curiosity as a community of Yankees would
have done. I turned up a street that led me to the castle, which looked
very picturesque close at hand,--more so than at a distance, because the
towers and walls have not a sufficiently broken outline against the sky.
There are several round towers at the angles of the wall very large in
their circles, built of gray stone, crumbling, ivy-grown, everything that
one thinks of in an old ruin. I could not get into the inner space of
the castle without climbing over a fence, or clambering down into the
moat; so I contented myself with walking round it, and viewing it from
the outside. Through the gateway I saw a cow feeding on the green grass
in the inner court of the castle. In one of the walls there was a large
triangular gap, where perhaps the assailants had made a breach. Of
course there were weeds on the ruinous top of the towers, and along the
summit of the wall. This was the first castle built by Edward I. in
Wales, and he resided here during the erection of Conway Castle, and here
Queen Eleanor gave birth to a princess. Some few years since a meeting
of Welsh bards was held within it.
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.
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