basis of that great industrial organisation the Ocean Collieries, famed throughout this country and wherever coal is used for navigation. [Picture: Talerddig Cutting. Reproduced from the "Great Western Magazine."] For Mr. Davies was now left to finish the Newtown and Machynlleth line alone. While he was obtaining stone--and gold--out of Talerddig, his former partner, Mr. Savin, had turned his attention to another link in the chain between the Severn and the sea. In the end this arrangement, although it seems to have led to some little feeling between the former partners, which Mr. Whalley and others did their best to dispel, probably expedited the completion of the through connection. At any rate, it did not hinder progress among the hills. In this, the "long looked-for arrival of the world-wide famed iron-horse," as an expansive journalistic scribe put it, at Carno, was celebrated by rejoicings, and a dinner given by Mr. David Davies to his foremen and a presentation by him of a purse of 50 pounds to the "meritorious engine-driver, Mr. Richard Metcalfe." Toasts were honoured, and Mr. Davies giving that of the evening, expatiated at length on the virtues of the redoubtable "Richard." The whole secret of the speed with which the railways he had constructed had been accomplished rested in "Richard's" zeal and prowess. Though the sea had covered their handiwork on the Vale of Clwyd railway half a dozen times, "Richard" had stuck to his post, by day and night--"from two o'clock on Monday morning till twelve o'clock on Saturday night, without once going to bed." If they had made nineteen miles of the Oswestry and Newtown track in thirteen months it was "in no small degree owing to 'Richard's' never-failing energy. He never grumbled, but always met me with a pleasant smile." No wonder that Carno shouted its three times three in "Richard's" honour and hardly less amazing that the good fellow, on rising to reply, utterly broke down and could not complete a sentence of his carefully prepared oration. "Never mind, 'Richard,'" exclaimed Mr. David Howell, "that is more eloquent than a speech."