But in the country proper a new difficulty met me: not only were there
no empty cottages, but landowners stuck to their acres with such
jealous obstinacy that they refused to sell a rood of land for a
cottage on any terms whatever. I will give one example, which may be
taken as typical. There was a Welsh valley where I had once spent a
summer holiday, exquisitely retired and beautiful--a dozen miles from
the nearest railway. Beyond the green strath, with its few white
cottages and farms, rose on every side the wide hills, with Snowdon
towering over all like a dome. The hillside land had but a prairie
value. It had never been cultivated. A few sheep strayed over it; but
for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its
vociferous cascades. One would have supposed that had any one offered
to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land
would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have
proved remunerative to himself. On the contrary, the two great
landowners of the district stuck to every inch of soil as if it had
been sown with gold. The land was quite useless, as I have said. It
might have been worth three pounds an acre--yet they refused fifty.
They would not even let on lease. Nor could it be pretended that the
scenery would have lost any element of its charm by a cottage that
would have been scarcely observed on those vast slopes of Snowdon.
Jealous obstinacy, the desire to keep intact their own, the desire to
keep out all intruders--this was the temper of the landowners. They
did all they could to harass their existing tenants. A tenant whose
family had increased so that his cottage was as overcrowded as a
tenement in Spitalfields, had to plead long before he was allowed to
add a couple of rooms to his cottage, even when he did so at his own
expense. Often enough he was refused so harshly, that he was
constrained to seek a house in some other district. Yet, in all that
valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two