After that summer they began in earnest the building of Llanyglo. Come and see them at it.

Whence came these stone-carts and timber-carts, these girders and castings, a single one only taking up a couple of trucks? Whence came these wains of floor-boards with their trailing tails bobbing up and down within an inch or two of the white road, these bastions of metal and ballast, these crawling and earth-shaking traction-engines with the little bellies and the monstrous wheels and the dotted line of lorries and trollies behind them? Whence these sawn planks, these massive frames with machinery parts on them so heavy that every rut threatens a standstill, these contractors' vans with absurd little trolley-wheels, these gatlings of drain-pipes, these wagons of plumbers' material, these vans of provisions, this army of men? Why do these now choke the roads that formerly were empty save for the passing of a wain of whispering hay, or the light market-cart that left a smell of raspberries and a stain of Welsh song behind, or Ned Kerr with his folding hut and clogging-knife, or Ynys Lovell with her packing-case cart and her mother with her loops of cane seeking chairs to mend? Where did they come from, and what are they doing here?

The stone, of course, comes from the Porth Neigr quarry, where the blasts shake the rocks and the shooting of waste resounds throughout the day. And the castings come from Manchester and Middlesborough and Wigan and Leeds. And the sawn planks come from Russia and the Baltic, and the larches for scaffolding from the Merionethshire valleys. These things come from these places—if you look at it that way. But look at it the other way and they have an origin mystical indeed. They are conceived of fecund nods and looks, of the germination of writing and initials and signatures and contract-stamps. They are born of print and promotion and allotment, and the cord is cut when sums are paid on application, and more in three months' time. They thrive when Chairmen, standing up on platforms, say "the adoption of the Accounts has been moved and seconded——," and become lusty when more clerks have to be called in, and temporary premises have to be taken, to cope with the public rush for the splendid thing. You see their real origin on those blackboards that seem to set Llanyglo its new multiplication sum, and in those paragraphs in the Manchester and Liverpool and London papers. You see it again when the new Local Government Bill receives the Royal Assent. You see it once more when from the machines of printers in Nottingham and Harrow and Frome and Belfast there are turned out the posters that already overspread the northern hoardings, bidding Blackpool look to itself, warning Douglas that it has another competitor, elbowing Bridlington, shoving Yarmouth aside. There are half a dozen of these posters out already, and if they are not strictly speaking representations of Llanyglo, they are something more—they are prophecies, which you will do well to heed if you want to put your money on a good thing. There is one in Lime Street Station, Liverpool (you need not glance at that upper window; you'd have a job to find poor Terry Armfield's Trwyn Avenue now). It is the "Welsh Giantess" one. She is dressed in a black steeple hat with a white hood underneath it, red check shawl, striped petticoat, and has buckles on her shoes. She holds the town in a three-quarter circle in her arms, with children at play on the sands and super-Briggses and super-Laceys all spilling out in the foreground. The mountains are indigo, the hotels pink, the sands chrome yellow, and the name LLANYGLO sprawls across the sky as if the Trwyn Light had dropped it there in passing, a letter at a time.... The poster, of course, is a little grandiose: nobody cries stinking fish. The Pier, for example, isn't there yet. But it is somewhere, in somebody's desk-drawer, perhaps, or perhaps it has even got farther than that. Perhaps the caissons are already on the way; certainly a group of strangers has been busy on the shore any time this past twelve months. And the Promenade isn't ex-act-ly like that yet. It has railings not unlike those, but not yet that fine stretch of impregnable sea-wall. And so with the hotels.... But all in good time. These things will all be ready quite as soon as those posters have sunk into the perception of the public. We mustn't have a completely equipped town standing empty for a number of seasons while folk make up their minds whether they'll come or not. We have the money, the men, powers under the new Act ample as our hearts could wish, and the certainty of the coming reward.

Llanyglo itself found it difficult to realise what was happening. It all came in such strides. Where the stake-and-wire-enclosed roads had been, a giant hoarding would rise, twenty, forty, fifty yards long. On this hoarding, by means of the railway posters, Llanyglo would be told all about itself—its climate, its mild winters, its accessibility from all parts, and its "unrivalled attractions." It read Gilbert Smythe's signature there. And among these were other bills curiously opposite, which told them that if they in their turn needed change, there were week-end tickets to be had to Liverpool and Belle Vue at specially reduced rates.—And while Llanyglo knew, as month succeeded month, that work was going on behind these hoardings, the effect was none the less magical when, on the day they were knocked to pieces again, the astounding frontage appeared. They had known nothing like it since that piece of witchcraft of the Kerrs, and now several times they had seen it happen. It had happened between the "Cambrian" and "Cardigan" hotels. It had happened at Pritchard's Corner. And now it was about to happen again, along a line that ran from a point just below the Kerrs' Hafod to the piece of land, not built on yet, where for three days one Spring a circus was set up, its cages and caravans and the guy-ropes of its tenting all mingled with the timber-stacks and mortar-engines and breastworks of stone setts and other dumpings of a dozen different contractors. Later, a temporary wooden shed occupied this space. This shed was town-hall, concert-hall, general purposes hall, and theatre thrown into one. That was the time Llanyglo began to discover that if one of its inhabitants wished to meet another he had better appoint a time and place to do so. To climb up the nearest sandhill and take a look round no longer served.

And even these amazing unfoldings were as nothing compared with that which (it was already known) was to happen next—the construction of the sea-wall and the Pier.

Philip Lacey's Floral Valley was already finished. Its gravelled walks, with steps every few yards, straggled up both sides of the ravine in the side of the Trwyn, and from the topmost of these you could look down on the octagonal roof of the bandstand that occupied the levelled plot in the middle. Sticking (as it were) the point of his compasses into the bandstand, Philip had described successions of eighth and quarter-circles, with radiating paths and variously shaped smaller beds in between; and of these he had made a piece of crewel-work of colour. Golden feather and London pride, lobelia and pinks and bachelors'-buttons, formed the borders; behind them, in ovals and stars and crown-shapes and monograms, mignonette and arabis and dwarf pansies and Virginia stock were set; and so he had brushed-and-combed and curled and scented the whole place. He had staked his professional reputation, too, that from the first crocus to the last Michaelmas daisy, the gaudy Catherine-wheel would never be for a single day out of bloom; and then he had departed, leaving the responsibility of upkeep to the delighted town. John Willie Garden, looking at the Valley's logical plan, wished that the town itself had had as fair, if severe, a start.

For John Willie was Clerk of the Works now in a very different sense from that in which he had had charge of the coming of Railhead. He was now nineteen, and had no longer any wish to go into the business in Manchester. His father, noting his tastes and capacity, had judged it perfectly safe to depart, leaving John Willie to look after things in his stead; and as no contractor's foreman wished to quarrel with the son of the principal maker of the place, he had a fairly large authority. So John Willie occupied the house by the shore, with Minetta to make him comfortable. He spent his days in passing from this building to that, pushing at doors in hoardings marked "No Admittance," threading his way along the wheeling-planks, mounting ladders, looking down on the swarming men from the stagings, looking up through the groves of the scaffold-poles, looking out, not over the sandhills now, but over other houses built and building. The masts and spars of other scaffold-poles here and there might almost have made you think that a navigable river twisted through Llanyglo, and that these were the rigging of the vessels upon it. From one work to another he passed, approving, questioning, telephoning, making notes. There is scarce a room of that period of Llanyglo's up-springing but, even to-day, John Willie Garden can tell you the lie of its water-pipes, where its main-cocks are, where its drains, its gas-connections, the depth of its foundations, the branchings of its chimney-flues. He hasn't been into half of them since, but the present occupiers can tell him nothing about which cellars are on the rock and when the girders are due to be repainted. And he could talk to the men as well as to their bosses. He addressed them authoritatively, but he knew their football and their drinking, their jokes and songs, which dog belonged to which and which among them "subbed" or "liened" before his wage was due. John Willie Garden's boyhood lay behind him now.

What was John Willie like to look at by this time, and what was his outlook on the world?

You may meet his kind at six o'clock any morning, the sons of Alderman This or Sir John That, going to their fathers' engineering-shops in Leeds, or to Manchester spinning-sheds, or Rochdale factories, or dye-works, or rolling-mills, or drawing-offices, or electrical works. They wear greasy blue overalls and carry tin luncheon-cans, and use cotton-waste for handkerchiefs. They glory in the readiness of their repartee to their fathers' workmen, to be mistaken for one of whom gives them the keenest pleasure. Joyously they attack the blackest and greasiest of the work, honestly forgetting that they could leave this to others if they wished.—But see them in the evening! They have had tea and a "clean-up" by this time. Their heads have been soused and their hands pumiced, they have on their mahogany boots and their white collars, the hands that wielded crowbars or strained with the grip of spanners ply thin and expensive canes now, and you can see the radiance of their approach a quarter of a mile away. They are off to billiard-rooms and card-parties, theatre-boxes, or courting. They will be home fairly early, because of the five-o'clock alarum in the morning, but until then they are so evidently about to enjoy themselves that you sigh if you are unable to join them. Go one night and watch them when next the Pantomime comes. Sit in the second row of the stalls (you won't be able to get into the first row). If the leading lady is pretty, and John Willie and Percy Briggs are there, you won't consider your evening wasted. The show is sure to "go."

That, more or less, was John Willie. He had rather a lot of money to spend, but nowhere much to spend it yet. His hair was a little less primrose coloured than it had been (pomatum does darken hair a little), but his eyes had not altered. They were still just as receptive or just as stupid as he cared to make them, blue as flax, and capable, if you happened to catch him at something he did not wish to be caught at, of a rather hard and prolonged stare. He was not tall—long ago it had been plain he would not be—but, looking at his shoulders, hung as it were from an apex at the back of his head, you would have wondered at the lightness of the pit-pat of his feet when he did a step-dance on the occasion of one of the men's "birthdays" (which have nothing to do with days of birth, by the way, but frequently much to do with an unfancied horse and a longish price). In a word, he was a nicish, powerful young rascal, with an expensive dressing-case and a trace of those Lancashire final "g's"; and he and his friends (of whom he had a good many down to Llanyglo) had their own corner in the "Cambrian" lounge, unless the evening's programme included cards or involved the use of a room with a piano in it.

Yet, though the Llanyglo air might thrill with the clink-clink of chisels on stone, and vibrate with the jolting of the builders' carts, and resound with all the noises of the swift building, still, nobody who now came thought it ruined. On the contrary, exactly as the Briggses and the Laceys had predicted, it came to them with shocks of delight. For think of it: here was no twopenny ride on a clanging tram through naked, unshaded streets before they could reach the sea. Here was no two-miles plod back again over the burning asphalt, slackening every nerve that had been braced up by the bathe. Here was no Brighton nor Scarborough nor Blackpool yet, with nettings of electric wires overhead and perspective of rails below. No: from any part of the place, three minutes would take you, if not in every case to the beach itself, at any rate to an open space of thyme and harebells and hillocks of clean sand, where, if you got on the right side of the sandhill, you might not know that there was a crane or a scaffold within miles. And if the beach was ploughed and harrowed and tramped and trodden until it resembled a dirty batter-pudding, half a day and a tide, and the sands were smooth and shining again, and the wet stretches seemed as much sky as land, and passing birds were reflected in their depths. The sea tidied up the shore again as the housemaids took up the crumbs from the hotel carpets.—And there were dozens of boats now, in which you could push out a few hundred yards and find yourself in spots that man can never sully. Five minutes' tugging at the oars and you could rock and gaze up at the sky, or look over the boat's side at the translucent green reflection of its curving boards below, and past that into glassy clear depths, and so past that again to where the water began to show you, not its depths, but the broken mirroring of the sky again. The boating was one of the "unrivalled attractions." By nine o'clock every morning a row of boatmen leaned against the railings between the "Cambrian" and the jetty, smoking, scanning the front, showing you fresh bait, and offering boats by the hour, the morning, or the day. Foremost among them, as likely as not, would be Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs. He wore a blue gausey with a diamond woven across the breast, touched the peak of his dirty old petty-officer's cap constantly, and told folk it was "a gradely morning for fishing." Though the youngest, he was the least reputable of the Kerrs. Ned, the eldest, Llanyglo counted part of itself; the two middle ones were both contractors' foremen, and respected citizens; but Tommy had become the scandal of Llanyglo. You were well advised to allow him double time or more if you gave him a bag to carry anywhere and there was the temptation of beer on the way; and you might catch him sober if you engaged him and his boat soon after breakfast, but your chance of doing so became ever less as the day wore on.

Who were these people who strolled among the droning bees of the sandhills or pushed out from the shore in boats? Well, they were of more kinds than one or two now. The charges at the "Cambrian" were still stiffish; a week there cost as much as a fortnight at the "Cardigan," or a month at the "Montgomery"; and so we still exhibit the social degrees. There has even been a certain amount of "feeling" about this. Of two Rochdale men, say, with little to choose between them in point of income, one will be seen on the "Cambrian's" balcony in the evening after dinner, his heart-shaped dinner-shirt one of a number of heart-shaped dinner-shirts, the bosom and neck and head of the lady he is chatting with rising out of her lacy corsage as a bouquet rises from the paper frill that encloses and bedecks it. He will be seen there, with the red-shaded lamps of the empty dining-room behind him and the moonlight making his sunburnt face very dark. But the other's face is sunburnt too, and at half the cost. He too could attitudinise like this were he so minded. And he reflects that Jones or Jackson may cut a dash among strangers, but he mustn't try it on with people who know him at home. As for himself, he's thankful to say that he's just the same wherever he is, at home or away on a holiday....

In fact Jones or Jackson is precisely the man Edward Garden more than half expected—the man who can't quite afford it, but will.... But this, it is hardly necessary to observe, is to take the "Cambrian" at less than its average and the "Cardigan" at rather more.

The "Montgomery" is actually outclassed by the better "Private Hotels" and one or two of the superior "Boarding Establishments." Indeed, of these last the "Cadwallader" almost ranks with the "Cambrian" itself. And so we come by degrees down to Ham-and-Egg Terrace.—But enough of these nuances of difference of a fortnight's duration. Who, taken by-and-large, are these people, and where do they come from?

You have only to ask yourself, "Who else should they be?" and your question is half answered. Remember the smallness of these Islands, and the scores of pulsing, radiating, almost radio-active centres within them, every one swarming with folk who intend to have a better time than their fathers have had. Could the East Coast be pushed out beyond the North Sea, and Lancashire be stretched until it took in Galway, St. George's Channel and all, there might be room enough on England's shores for every parliamentary voter to have a few acres of Trwyn foreshore of his own and a black cow walking up and down them, seeking coolness and food hock-deep in the glistening ebb; but, as things are, the littoral is by much too small. True, scores and fifties of miles of it remain practically unvisited; but no snail has snuffled out its manganese there, and they are not within a few hours and a thirty-shilling circular fare of the human ant-heaps of the land, where King's Ransoms of Holiday Club money are put by. There was no wonder about the growth of Llanyglo. Geographically situated as it was, the marvel would have been had it not grown. With a few posters and similar devices to advertise it, it would presently continue to advertise itself.

Therefore the folk who flocked there were of every kind, short of the grey and overwhelming multitude itself. Because it was only partly built, because it had not yet shaken down to a definite character and physiognomy and personality, it spread its net the wider. Did you want to dress for dinner, and to have your luggage carried by a man in a red jacket? There was the "Cambrian." Did you want everything that the Cambrians had, barring only the luxury of being seen lounging in one of the wicker-chairs about its portals, and still to keep your money in your pocket? There was the "Cardigan." Did you want to read or to idle, to botanise or merely to forget your cares for a fortnight, to picnic up the Trwyn or to have your meals in bed? They asked no questions at the "Montgomery." From Philip Lacey's piece of Floral Geometry to the nooks on the farther side of the Trwyn where you could spend a whole morning undisturbed, there was something for every taste. And they actually had to turn people away who had been so ill-advised as to come with their luggage without having first secured their lodging.

And now it had come to this: that while these came to Llanyglo for a change of air, John Willie Garden, who spent his days among lime and mortar and wheeling-planks and newly dressed stone, frequently turned his back on Llanyglo for precisely the same reason. Once a week or so he was seen to drive past Pritchard's Corner in a light yellow trap at nine o'clock in the morning. He was off to see to another of his father's interests—that "catchment area" far away up in the mountains. He drove eight miles, put up at an inn past which a trout-stream brawled (hardly yet settled from its precipitous plunging cataracts), and then set out on foot up a road that rose one-in-five under a whispering wood, to see the skyline of which you had to throw your head back. It took him an hour of walking to get to his destination—a solitary wooden cabin where the agent lived. The agent had on the whole an easy time of it, for hardly a hundred yards from his cabin door, above the woods now, lay Llyn Delyn, pure looking-glass in the mile long crook of the mountain. An old boat was moored among the sedges at one end, the launching of which on the unbroken surface of that lovely water always seemed to invoke vague judgments, penalties perhaps forborne, but none the less incurred. Here the agent, whose name was Sharpe, fished. John Willie fished with him. Fishing was a good enough way of passing the time, for they were not really doing anything up there. They were merely waiting—waiting for more people to come to Llanyglo, for the Town Hall to rise, for the seat of local administration to be shifted from Porth Neigr, and then for the Waterworks Scheme. They had the water as fast as prevision and Law could make it. They would not drive too hard a bargain with the town. In the meantime they fished, speaking little, noting whether it was the gnat or the cochybondhu that killed, casting so lightly that the boat scarcely rocked. Sometimes, when the amber evening light was clear behind them, so impeccable was the profound mirror below that, while their tweed-clad forms could hardly be distinguished from the hues of the mountain behind, the upside-down shapes beneath them were sharp and dark as the silhouettes in your grandmother's little oval frames.