ve 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
into the porch.

Two men were seated in the cool tap-room, each with a pasty and a mug
of beer. A composition of sweat and coal-dust had caked their faces,
and so deftly smoothed all distinction out of their features that
it seemed at the moment natural and proper to take them for twins.
Perhaps this was an error: perhaps, too, their appearance of extreme
age was produced by the dark grey dust that overlaid so much of them
as showed above the table. As twins, however, I remember them, and
cannot shake off the impression that they had remained twins for an
unusual number of years.

One addressed me. "Parties outside pretty comfortable?" he asked.

"They were drinking out of the same cup," I answered.

He nodded. "Made man and wife this mornin'. I don't fairly know
what's best to do. Lord knows I wouldn' hurry their soft looks and
dilly-dallyin'; but did 'ee notice how much beverage was left in the
cup?"

"They was mated at Tregarrick, half-after-nine this mornin'," observed
the other twin, pulling out a great watch, "and we brought 'em
down here in a truck for their honeymoon. The agreement was for a