“To hell with your railway,” said the Gunner. “Who would make a railway heading for the river Severn? No . . . It’s a pipe-track. This here’s the Welsh water scheme.” “Where is it going to?” “North Bromwich.” “And where does it come from?” “From Wales. . . . From the Dulas Valley, where they’re rebuilding the reservoir under a hill they call Savaddan. And a black job it is, I can tell you.” “Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre? I think it must be.” “Right, my son. The pipe-line goes through Felindre. Sixty or eighty mile from here.” “My people come from Felindre . . .” “Well, God pity them. . . . That’s all I can say. I’ve been in that place on a Christmas Day, and not a pint of beer stirring. . . . Ah, that’s a black job. Well, mates, come on. . . .” Again the men who had been listening, lifted their picks and spades, and the busy clinking sounds of digging began again. Edwin wished the Gunner good-afternoon, and began to push his bicycle up the hill again. Sixty or eighty miles. . . . That wasn’t so very far. Six or eight hours’ ride. . . . Perhaps some day he could go there. He half persuaded himself with a sentimental argument that it was only natural that he should be happy in the country from which his mother’s people had come; that even the borderland of it must be possessed by the same curiously friendly atmosphere. “I’m always most happy west of Severn,” he thought. And then he began to wonder about the sailor whom the men called Gunner. Perhaps that man had actually been in Africa. . . . He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little general shop on the very crown of the hills, where a small hamlet named Far Forest stood. The romantic name of the place appealed to him; and it was a curious adventure to sit down alone to tea in a back room that smelt of candles and paraffin and bacon. At the shop door a serious old man with a white beard had received him; but the tea was brought to him by a little girl in an extremely clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as Eva. She was a curious mixture of shyness and friendliness, and her serious eyes examined Edwin minutely from under straight dark eyebrows. When she came in with the tea she found Edwin examining some books that stood in a cupboard with a glass door. Evidently she was very proud of them. “They are my brother James’s prizes,” she said, and went on to explain how clever he was and what a scholar, until the old man called “Eva,” and she returned to him in the shop. It was all amazingly peaceful, with the westering sun flooding the doorway where the old man had been sitting out in a chair when Edwin arrived: and opposite the door was a little patch of green strewn with mossy boulders, a kind of platform in front of which the huge panorama of Clee and all the Radnor hills expanded.