a trading schooner brush the grasses on the river-bank as she came
before a southerly wind, and the haymakers stop and almost crick their
necks staring up at her top-sails. But between the moors and Ponteglos
the valley wound for fourteen miles or so between secular woods, so
steeply converging that for the most part no more room was left at the
bottom of the V than the river itself filled. The fisherman beside it
trampled on pimpernels, sundew, watermint, and asphodels, or pushed
between clumps of _Osmunda regalis_ that overtopped him by a couple of
feet. If he took to wading, there was much ado to stand against the
current. Only here and there it spread into a still black pool,
greased with eddies; and beside such a pool, it was odds that he found
a diminutive meadow, green and flat as a billiard-table, and edged
with clumps of fern. To think of Cuckoo Valley is to call up the smell
of that fern as it wrapped at the bottom of the creel the day's catch
of salmon-peal and trout.

The town of Tregarrick (which possessed a gaol, a workhouse, and a
lunatic asylum, and called itself the centre of the Duchy) stood
three miles back from the lip of this happy valley, whither on summer
evenings its burghers rambled to eat cream and junket at the Dairy
Farm by the river bank, and afterwards sit to watch the fish rise,
while the youngsters and maidens played hide-and-seek in the woods.
But there came a day when the names of Watt and Stephenson waxed great
in the land, and these slow citizens caught the railway frenzy.
They took it, however, in their own fashion. They never dreamed of
connecting themselves with other towns and a larger world, but of
aggrandisement by means of a railway that should run from Tregarrick
to nowhere in particular, and bring the intervening wealth to their
doors. They planned a railway that should join Tregarrick with Cuckoo
Valley, and there divide into two branches, the one bringing ore and