clay from the moors, the other fetching up sand and coal from the sea.
Surveyors and engineers descended upon the woods; then a cloud of
navvies. The days were filled with the crash of falling timber and the
rush of emptied trucks. The stream was polluted, the fish died, the
fairies were evicted from their rings beneath the oak, the morals of
the junketing houses underwent change. The vale knew itself no longer;
its smoke went up week by week with the noise of pick-axes and oaths.

On August 13th, 1834, the Mayor of Tregarrick declared the new line
open, and a locomotive was run along its rails to Dunford Bridge, at
the foot of the moors. The engine was christened _The Wonder of the
Age_; and I have before me a handbill of the festivities of that proud
day, which tells me that the mayor himself rode in an open truck,
"embellished with Union Jacks, lions and unicorns, and other loyal
devices." And then Nature settled down to heal her wounds, and the
Cuckoo Yalley Railway to pay no dividend to its promoters.

It is now two years and more since, on an August day, I wound up my
line by Dunford Bridge, and sauntered towards the Light Horseman Inn,
two gunshots up the road. The time was four o'clock, or thereabouts,
and a young couple sat on a bench by the inn-door, drinking cocoa out
of one cup. Above their heads and along the house-front a vine-tree
straggled, but its foliage was too thin to afford a speck of shade as
they sat there in the eye of the westering sun. The man (aged about
one-and-twenty) wore the uncomfortable Sunday-best of a mechanic,
with a shrivelled, but still enormous, bunch of Sweet-William in his
buttonhole. The girl was dressed in a bright green gown and a white
bonnet. Both were flushed and perspiring, and I still think they must
have ordered hot cocoa in haste, and were repenting it at leisure.
They lifted their eyes and blushed with a yet warmer red as I passed