dresses which she made for herself by the light of nature and what she could remember of the current fashions at Merrick Kirk, to which she went every alternate Sunday. Her father and she took day about. Wet or shine, she tramped to Merrick Kirk, even when the rain blattered and the wind raved and bleated alternately among the pines of the Long Wood of Barbrax. Her father had a simpler way of spending his day out. He went down to the Railway Inn and drank “ginger-beer” all day with the landlord. Ginger-beer is an unsteadying beverage when taken the day by the length. Also the man who drinks it steadily and quietly never enters on any       inheritance of length of days.     

       So it came to pass that one night Gavin Balchrystie did not come home at all—at least, not till he was brought lying comfortably on the door of a disused third-class carriage, which was now seeing out its career anchored under the bank at Loch Merrick, where Gavin had used it as a shelter. The driver of the “six-fifty up” train had seen him walking soberly along toward The Huts (and the Railway Inn), letting his long surface-man’s hammer fall against the rail-keys occasionally as he walked. He saw him bend once, as though his keen ear detected a false ring in a       loose length between two plates. This was the last that was seen of him till the driver of the “nine-thirty-seven down” express—the       “boat-train,” as the employees of the P.P.R. call it, with a touch of respect in their voices—passed Gavin fallen forward on his face just when he was flying down grade under a full head of steam. It was duskily clear, with a great lake of crimson light dying into purple over the hills of midsummer heather. The driver was John Platt, the Englishman from Crewe, who had been brought from the great London and Northwestern Railway, locally known as “The Ell-nen-doubleyou.” In these remote railway circles the talk is as exclusively of matters of the four-foot way as in Crewe or Derby. There is an inspector of traffic, whose portly presence now graces Carlisle Station, who left the P.P.R. in these sad days of amalgamation, because he could not endure to see so many “Sou’west”        waggons passing over the sacred metals of the P.P.R. permanent way. From his youth he had been trained in a creed of two articles: “To swear by the P.P.R. through thick and thin, and hate the apple green of the       ‘Sou’west.’” It was as much as he could do to put up with the sight of the abominations; to have to hunt for their trucks when they got astray was more than mortal 

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