the road behind them, and walked bravely past, pretending to have no
business at that portal. They had descended a good thirty yards
beyond (such haste was put into them by dread of having their purpose
guessed) before the vehicle overtook them--a four-wheeled dog-cart
carrying a commercial traveller, who pulled up and offered them a lift
into the town.

They declined.

Then, as soon as he passed out of sight, they turned, and began
painfully to climb back towards the gate. Of the two, the woman had
shown the less emotion. But all the way her lips were at work, and as
she went she was praying a prayer. It was the only one she used night
and morning, and she had never changed a word since she learned it as
a chit of a child. Down to her seventieth year she had never found it
absurd to beseech God to make her "a good girl"; nor did she find it
so as the Workhouse gate opened, and she began a new life.




CUCKOO VALLEY RAILWAY


This century was still young and ardent when ruin fell upon Cuckoo
Valley. Its head rested on the slope of a high and sombre moorland,
scattered with granite and china-clay; and by the small town of
Ponteglos, where it widened out into arable and grey pasture-land, the
Cuckoo river grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage
from the coast at the spring tides. I have seen there the boom of