tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three
steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them. He
resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the
evidences of prosperity.

And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?

It had been far liker the thing, he thought--the old hump-backed bridge
with the grass and ferns growing in the crannies. He had waded in Cuddy
when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin
cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had
bathed in it as it wound, clear and shining, among the green meadows
outside the town, and run "skirl-naked" to dry himself, in full sight of
scandalised passengers in the Edinburgh train; he had slid on it in
winter. The memory of the little stream had always lain in the back of
his mind as something precious--and now to find it spanned by a staring
new stone bridge. Those Town Councils with their improvements!

Even Tweed Bridge had not been left alone. It had been widened, as an
inscription in the middle told the world at large. He leant on it and
looked up the river. Peel Tower was the same, anyway. No one had dared
to add one cubit to its grey stature. It was a satisfaction to look at
something so unchanging.

The sun had still something of its summer heat, and it was pleasant to
stand there and listen to the sound of the river over the pebbles and
see the flaming trees reflected in the blue water all the way up
Tweedside till the river took a wide curve before the green slope on
which the castle stood. A wonderfully pretty place, Priorsford, he told
himself: a home-like place--if one had anyone to come home to.