coming within sight of the station, a little before
noon, I put up my tackle and strolled towards the booking-office. The
water was much too fine for sport, and it seemed worth while to break
off for a pipe and a look at the 12.26 train. Such are the simple
pleasures of a country life.

I leant my rod against the wall, and was setting down my creel, when,
glancing down the platform, I saw an old man seated on the furthest
bench. Everybody knows how a passing event, or impression, sometimes
appears but a vain echo of previous experience. Something in the lines
of this old man's figure, as he leaned forward with both hands clasped
upon his staff, gave me the sensation. "All this has happened before,"
I told myself. "He and I are playing over again some small and futile
scene in our past lives. I wonder who he is, and what is the use of
it?"

But there was something wanting in the picture to complete its
resemblance to the scene for which I searched my memory.

The man had bent further forward, and was resting his chin on his
hands and staring apathetically across the rails. Suddenly it dawned
on me that there ought to be another figure on the bench--the figure
of an old woman; and my memory ran back to the day after this railway
was opened, when this man and his wife had sat together on the
platform waiting to see the train come in--that fascinating monster
whose advent had blotted out the very foundations of the old mill and
driven its tenants to a strange home.

The mill had disappeared many months before that, but the white dust
still hung in the creases of the miller's clothes. He wore his Sunday
hat and the Sunday polish on his shoes; and his wife was arrayed in
her best Paisley shawl. She carried also a bunch of cottage flowers,
withering in her large hot hand. It was clear they had never seen a
locomotive before, and wished to show it all respect. They had taken
a smaller house in the next valley, where they attempted to live on
their savings; and had been trying vainly and pitifully to struggle
with all the little habits that had been their life for thirty-five
years, and to adapt them to new quarters. Their faces were weary,
but flushed with expectation. The man kept looking up the line, and
declaring that he heard the rumble of the engine in the distance; and
whenever he said this, his wife pulled the shawl more primly about her
shoulders, straightened her back, and nervously re-arranged her posy.

When at