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