To tell the truth, Llanyglo was now rather a dreary-looking place. They had broken its sylvan eggs, but had hardly yet begun the making of its urban omelette. The above-mentioned announcement was not the only one of its kind; there was another halfway between the Kerrs' house and Pritchard's, and a third at Pritchard's corner. These, it was known, awoke faint and distant echoes in little paragraphs in Manchester and Liverpool papers. The Company so far was a private one; it hardly knew yet what powers it might presently expect to possess; but Mr. Tudor Williams and others were finding out. As a matter of fact, they were rather anxious about these powers. An Act of Parliament two years before had seemed to promise them certain things that might prove immensely to their advantage; but of the two great Local Government Acts (of 1888 and 1894), the first was still in a plastic state, and the second not yet thought of. Hitherto Porth Neigr had been the centre of administration; it was now being sought to shift that centre. And, with the cumbrous old machinery of Boards of Guardians and Poor Law Overseers out of the way, Howell Gruffydd, it was whispered, might before long become a Councillor. Indeed, who would make a better one? Edward Garden? Edward Garden preferred to depute powers of this kind. The Laceys and Briggses, on a property qualification? These had their own affairs to attend to, and were summer residents only. John Pritchard? Stern John, as unchallenged ruler of the Baptist Chapel, was already a Councillor in a deeper sense than that defined by any mundane Act. William Morgan? Not substantial enough. John Roberts? Dafydd Dafis? The Squire?--The claims of all of them paled before that of Howell Gruffydd the grocer.... The leases were being taken up too. The Llanyglo Pavilion, Limited, was incorporated before a spade was set in the sand. The great blackboard between the Kerrs' house and Pritchard's Corner bore a significant diagonal paper strip with four fifteen-inch letters in red upon it--SOLD. Negotiations were proceeding for the acquisition of the land at the Corner itself. And Edward Garden had completed that rumoured purchase of his far up in the mountains. It was a "catchment area" for water, and if, under the new distribution, the Council should find itself possessed of large borrowing-powers, it might possibly find the private ownership of those hundreds of acres far away up Delyn an awkward matter. And the excavation was already being made for the row of houses that later was known as "Ham-and-Egg Terrace"--a hundred and fifty yards of building that at first awed Llanyglo by its grandeur, but which they subsequently came to think a poor affair and did their best to conceal.