But something was coming to Llanyglo.

As Edward Garden might have said, looking at this something under his glasses and over his glasses as it crept slowly up out of the east—as Edward Garden might have said, looking at it again and yet again, and then gazing mildly and mistrustfully through the glasses at you, it appeared to be a railway.

At any rate, if it was not coming to Llanyglo it was coming within three miles of it.

As if a snail should leave behind it a track, not of slime, but of new iron, grey at first, then red with rust, but soon to be bright again, so it came on; and in other respects also it resembled a snail. It carried, for example, its lodging with it. And it put forward sensitive and intelligent antennÆ as it sought its food thirty miles away down the coast—manganese. It left the junction half a mile beyond Porth Neigr, and it was going to Abercelyn.

The lodging that the snail carried with it was called Railhead. Seen from a distance of a couple of miles it resembled a small excoriation on the face of the land; seen nearer it resolved itself into a town of wood and corrugated iron, with stockades of creosoted sleepers and trenches of earth and ramparts of ballast and metal for the laying of the permanent way. There were superintendents' offices and the sheds of clerks of works; there were forges and stables and strings of waggons and a telegraph cabin; there were huts and pumping-stations and cranes, stationary and travelling, and a gas-plant; and there were watchmen's boxes and the temporary dwellings of hundreds of men. By day these could be seen, spread out on the level or clustering about the embankments as the flies clustered about the treacled strings and fly-papers Howell Gruffydd hung up in his shop in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail seemed phosphorescent, its phosphorescence the flares and fires and lamps in cabin-windows and red eyes for danger that appeared when the other shift took over the work from the men of the day. Whistle of construction-engine and roar of dynamite cartridge; hiss of steam and clang of hammers as they fished the joints; rattle of road-metal as it was shot from the carts, and thud of the paviors' rammers; clank of couplings and agonised scream of a circular saw; purr of telephone-bells and the "Hallo!" as the clerk took down the receiver; sough of pumps and bubbling of cauldrons of tar; cries to horses, slish and slap of mortar and the clinking of the trowels; spitting of dinners cooking over the firebaskets, sounds of singing at night; with these and a hundred other noises the snail crept on with a spirit-level inside him—the level that kept him true to the line that had been laid down by staff and chain and theodolite a couple of years before.

And in some respects that something that looked so very much like a railway resembled not so much a snail as a snake. Did you ever see the great python that died lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a tree? Not a joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned over his harp. A yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist-thick creature would ripple and flow and roll upwards to the crutch of the stump; another yard would follow, piling ever up and up; and you would wait for the toppling over of the great golden reticulated cable. And then all motion in that portion of the great fake would suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you would become aware that another glittering section was a-crawl, balancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent.... Even so, before and behind Railhead, the work progressed. At a point the construction-engine stopped, the regiment of red and blue shirts and wondrous forearms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug and built and drained and by and by passed back the word that all was well. So they moved, between the finished and tested line at one point and the warning bell and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an end of much gorse and heath and of many banks of flowering campion and hassocks of wild thyme.

And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not passing within three miles of Llanyglo, it was bringing the hamlet's appointed destiny with it. It was bringing (though, to be sure, not for some years yet) a passenger-junction where yet only irises and bog-cotton grew and frogs boomed out over the marsh at night. It was bringing sidings where John Pritchard's farthest field of oats now rippled silver-green in the wind. It was bringing a goods-yard and signal-bridges, and sheds and platforms and turntables and a cabrank in front and rows of railwaymen's dwellings behind. It was bringing a different breed of men, a breed that so far Llanyglo knows only in the persons of the four Kerrs. More than this, it was bringing progress, and sophistication, and wealth for some but nothing for others, and jollity, and vice, and some knowledge that was good and some that Llanyglo would have been no worse without, and always loads, loads, trainloads of white-faced people from the smoky towns. And most of all it was bringing to that vague yet unmistakable town-soul of Llanyglo growth and experience, growth that it could not escape and experience that it must square with those numbered days of its idyllic nonage as best it can. Through growing-pains and wild-oats, through revulsions of young remorse and impossible panaceas of repentance, through shrugging worldliness and cynicism and the forgetfulness that lies in laughter, Llanyglo must pass before it becomes—whatever it is to be. One thing only is certain: it can never again be as it was when Edward Garden first went there. Its wild thyme will remain only in patches on its Trwyn, and its sandhills will be glaucous with the blue sea-holly no more. The black cattle have not much longer in which to pace its shore, and Terry Armfield's gridiron will be forgotten—no Sixpenny Guide will point the way down Delyn Avenue nor past his immaterial Crescents along Trwyn Way. Railhead is creeping on. Two of the Kerrs are already working there, the other two have just bought the last of Squire Wynne's alders. Squire Wynne has now no land except that occupied by the Plas and its tangled and mossy and grassy and neglected gardens. "Porth Neigr Omnibuses, Limited," is already a serious undertaking, for it will ply between Llanyglo and the nearest point of the line. Howell Gruffydd has an option on the two original cottages that Edward Garden had had matchboarded—he may soon be requiring a larger shop. Compensations will be paid right and left. And there will soon be a larger assortment of young men for Miss Nancy Pritchard to choose a husband from....

For something is coming to Llanyglo.

Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been clever enough in the matter of the Omnibuses, Limited, nor, for the matter of that, had his cleverness stopped there; but for astuteness he could not hold a candle to Edward Garden. Edward Garden was not a Member of Parliament. As he musingly said when people asked him why he was not, it was out of his line. Therefore, he and his friends had left to others the promotion of the Bill, its steering through Select Committees of both Houses, and the whole conduct of the negotiations that, in their different way, were no less complicated than that concentration of various forces by virtue of which Railhead crept ever slowly forward. To a regiment of lawyers had likewise been left the adjustments under the general Acts to which, on the passing of the Bill, the enterprise had become subject. Members and lawyers alike, those drest in a little brief obedience to the commands of the party whips, these as often as not Members themselves, were virtually the nominees of Edward Garden and his friends. Politics Edward Garden's "line"?... To all outward appearances he had no "line" at all. He merely added another emblem to that little cluster of Mercuries and Greyhounds and Winged Orbs that formed the pendant of his watch-chain. It was only when others, full of plans and hope and secrecy, sought "lines" for themselves that they discovered that he had been beforehand with them. To give an instance: When Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., apparently as representing somebody else, had come forward with an offer to take up the remnants of poor Terry's Thelema, he had found there were no remnants to take up. To give another instance: When, by carefully engineered good offices and intermediaries, Mr. Tudor Williams had sought a reconciliation with Squire Wynne, and presently had gone to see him, he had found that he had pocketed his pride for nothing—the Squire no longer had a yard of land to sell. In a word, before ever whispers of the Bill had begun to circulate in the lobbies of the House of Commons, the sandhills and oat-fields of Llanyglo had been cut up like a jigsaw puzzle, raffled, dealt in, apportioned, and owned; and, save for his small holding in Thelema, between the Omnibuses at Porth Neigr and manganese at Abercelyn, there were very few pickings for Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys.

Therefore he returned with an enthusiasm more ardent than ever to his original crusade against the private ownership of the land that God made for the people, and took his constituents by the button-holes, and spoke darkly of other Acts—Acts which by and by should give the Local Authority powers of compulsory purchase.

And all this time the eye still saw nothing to purchase but bents and blown sand, blue and lemon butterflies, nodding harebells, a few tidemarks of black seaweed, a wooden jetty, a cluster of thatched kerb, the three Chapels, Edward Garden's house, and Ty Kerr.

But something was coming to Llanyglo.

On the whole they did not talk very much about it. Each had his reason for reticence, or brooding, or resentment, or calculation, as the case might be. Nevertheless, with Railhead still many miles away, they began to become accustomed to the coming and going of strangers. They came, these strangers, to Edward Garden's house, sleeping either there or else at the double cottage down by the beach; Edward Garden himself, with a lantern in his hand, saw them hospitably over the sandhills to bed. They were surveyors and architects, accountants, geologists, prospectors, men in control of the snail that left the track of iron and grey ballast and upturned clay across the land, lawyers, conveyancers, the directors of the stone-quarries along the Porth Neigr road, and others at whose business Llanyglo could only guess. And Mr. Tudor Williams also went there, perhaps to talk about compulsory powers. These and others wandered in groups along the straggling lines of seaweed, and up the Trwyn, and far inland behind John Pritchard's farm, pointing, pacing, discussing, exactly as those minions of the Liverpool Syndicate had done that morning when work had suddenly ceased on Edward Garden's new house; but there was no talk of fence-burning now. Even Dafydd Dafis saw the hopelessness of it, and once more went about with his head bowed like a head of corn heavy with rain. Already men were widening and levelling the Porth Neigr road. One week-end in July, after an unusually large gathering at Edward Garden's house, a new waggonette from Porth Neigr came to take them back in a body. It had a pair of horses, and it took the hills in style. Dafydd Dafis, whom the vehicle overtook on his ten miles' trudge into the town, was offered a seat, but he appeared not to hear, and the vehicle drove on, enveloping him in its dust. Half-way to Porth Neigr he came upon a squad of men setting up a telegraph pole. One of them spoke to him, in English. "Dim Saesneg," he muttered, and then perhaps wondered why he had done so. It might be "Dim Cymraeg" presently. A little farther on the waggonette passed him again, once more hiding him in its dust. No doubt it had turned aside up the rough road that led to the stone-quarries. Dafydd continued his trudge.

But in the household of Howell Gruffydd the grocer, a suppressed excitement reigned. This, when Dafydd Dafis happened to be there, showed only as resignation and a bowing to the inevitable; but at other times it seemed to confer a more frequent glitter to Howell's teeth, a new impulse to his jocularity, and a sparkle and sharpness to his wife's eyes. Cases and canisters the like of which he had never handled before were delivered at his door by the Porth Neigr carrier; these were for the consumption of Edward Garden and his guests; and he waited in person upon Mrs. Garden every Monday morning. He thought of having a Christmas almanack with his own name printed upon it. Blodwen, his wife, made him, in anticipation, a pair of linen half-sleeves that drew up over his forearms. Eesaac Oliver was forbidden any longer to fetch the eggs from the light-keeper's wife up the Trwyn; one of Hugh Morgan's boys might do this. As a preparation for Aberystwith, Eesaac Oliver was packed off to a second cousin of Blodwen's at Porth Neigr, there to attend an excellent endowed school. With the railway passing so near it would be a simple matter for him to spend his week-ends at Llanyglo.

And big consumptive John Pritchard rarely said a word about that onward-creeping snail that left its double thread of permanent track behind it, but he thought exaltedly and powerfully. Stories had already reached him of drunkenness at Railhead, and fights, and singing at nights, and other godless orgies, and his brow was sternly set. When he preached at the Baptist Chapel about such as loved darkness and the evil paths in which they walked, it was known that he was thinking of Railhead. Men were now plotting their levels almost within sight of Llanyglo. They turned their surveying instruments on the hamlet as if they had been guns, and laid out their chains as if they had been enslaving the soil itself. Then an advance gang approached, and, even while John knew that the end was near (but not so near as all that), that end came. Eight men marched one evening into Llanyglo, bawling a bawdy chorus, with Sam Kerr showing the way. They had bottles and piggins and stone jars of beer, and, slung with joined-up leather belts between two of them, swung a barrel. They stumbled through the loose sand towards the Hafod Unos, hiccoughing and polluting the peaceful evening. Ned Kerr had evidently been advised of their coming; he stood at the door of the Hafod to receive them; and the carousing began.... It lasted half the night, and then each clay-stained navvy and tattooed platelayer slept and snored where he fell. John Pritchard did not sleep. Faintly he could hear their singing where he lay. The red and white of the Trwyn light dyed the darkness overhead. John remembered his own words: "It is a den of li-ons——"

Something had already come to Llanyglo.