And in some respects that something that looked so very much like a railway resembled not so much a snail as a snake. Did you ever see the great python that died lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a tree? Not a joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned over his harp. A yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist-thick creature would ripple and flow and roll upwards to the crutch of the stump; another yard would follow, piling ever up and up; and you would wait for the toppling over of the great golden reticulated cable. And then all motion in that portion of the great fake would suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you would become aware that another glittering section was a-crawl, balancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent.... Even so, before and behind Railhead, the work progressed. At a point the construction-engine stopped, the regiment of red and blue shirts and wondrous forearms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug and built and drained and by and by passed back the word that all was well. So they moved, between the finished and tested line at one point and the warning bell and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an end of much gorse and heath and of many banks of flowering campion and hassocks of wild thyme. And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not passing within three miles of Llanyglo, it was bringing the hamlet's appointed destiny with it. It was bringing (though, to be sure, not for some years yet) a passenger-junction where yet only irises and bog-cotton grew and frogs boomed out over the marsh at night. It was bringing sidings where John Pritchard's farthest field of oats now rippled silver-green in the wind. It was bringing a goods-yard and signal-bridges, and sheds and platforms and turntables and a cabrank in front and rows of railwaymen's dwellings behind. It was bringing a different breed of men, a breed that so far Llanyglo knows only in the persons of the four Kerrs. More than this, it was bringing progress, and sophistication, and wealth for some but nothing for others, and jollity, and vice, and some knowledge that was good and some that Llanyglo would have been no worse without, and always loads, loads, trainloads of white-faced people from the smoky towns. And most of all it was bringing to that vague yet unmistakable town-soul of Llanyglo growth and experience, growth that it could not escape and experience that it must square with those numbered days of its idyllic nonage as best it can. Through growing-pains and wild-oats, through revulsions of young remorse and impossible panaceas of repentance, through shrugging worldliness and cynicism and the forgetfulness that lies in laughter, Llanyglo must pass before it becomes--whatever it is to be. One thing only is certain: it can never again be as it was when Edward Garden first went there.