chin on his hands and staring apathetically across the rails. Suddenly it dawned on me that there ought to be another figure on the bench--the figure of an old woman; and my memory ran back to the day after this railway was opened, when this man and his wife had sat together on the platform waiting to see the train come in--that fascinating monster whose advent had blotted out the very foundations of the old mill and driven its tenants to a strange home.
The mill had disappeared many months before that, but the white dust still hung in the creases of the miller's clothes. He wore his Sunday hat and the Sunday polish on his shoes; and his wife was arrayed in her best Paisley shawl. She carried also a bunch of cottage flowers, withering in her large hot hand. It was clear they had never seen a locomotive before, and wished to show it all respect. They had taken a smaller house in the next valley, where they attempted to live on their savings; and had been trying vainly and pitifully to struggle with all the little habits that had been their life for thirty-five years, and to adapt them to new quarters. Their faces were weary,
