"Might send a geologist down--one we could trust----" A very young member of the Syndicate hazarded a remark.--"But wouldn't burnt mine-works come dearer than burnt fences?" They smiled indulgently at him. He was merely suffering from a slight confusion of ideas. Nobody had said anything about mine-works. Then they turned to Terry. "What do you say, Armfield?" ... It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been no further fence-burning, but the Member for the constituency had been memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom, and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood. Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft they would make. "The whole thing looks like being a damned bad spec," the Syndicate grumbled. That opinion seemed to be gaming strength. There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a total loss. Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo. The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one, with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was this: With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still awaiting its sixpence--with all this arrested as life and growth and motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming out of its chimney. * * * * * That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_ the Squire's remark about invasion _viâ_ the Mersey, told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.