Fast Trotters Appeared To Be Common In These Parts, And As We Went Along The Road From Time To Time

A small cloud of dust would become visible far ahead of us, and in two or three minutes a farmer's

Trap would appear and rush past on its way to market, to vanish behind us in two or three minutes more and be succeeded by another and then others. By-and-by one came past driven by two young women, one holding the reins, the other playing with the whip. They were tall, dark, with black hair, and colourless faces, aged about thirty, I imagined. As they flew by I remarked, "I would lay a sovereign to a shilling that they are twins." "You'd lose your money - there's two or three years between them," said my driver. "Do you know them - you didn't nod to them nor they to you?" I said. "I know them," he returned, "as well as I know my own face when I look at myself in a glass." On which I remarked that it was very wonderful. "'Tis only a part of the wonder, and not the biggest part," he said. "You've seen what they are like and how like they are, but if you passed a day with them in the house you'd be able to tell one from the other; but if you lived a year in the same house with their two brothers you'd never be able to tell one from the other and be sure you were right. The strangest thing is that the brothers who, like their sisters, have two or three years between them, are not a bit like their sisters; they are blue-eyed and seem a different race."

That, I said, made it more wonderful still. A curiously symmetrical family. Rather awkward for their neighbours, and people who had business relations with them.

"Yes - perhaps," he said, "but it served them very well on one occasion to be so much alike."

I began to smell a dramatic rat and begged him to tell me all about it.

He said he didn't mind telling me. Their name was Prage - Antony and Martin Prage, of Red Pit Farm, which they inherited from their father and worked together. They were very united. One day one of them, when riding six miles from home, met a girl coming along the road, and stopped his horse to talk to her. She was a poor girl that worked at a dairy farm near by, and lived with her mother, a poor old widow-woman, in a cottage in the village. She was pretty, and the young man took a liking to her and he persuaded her to come again to meet him on another day at that spot; and there were many more meetings, and they were fond of each other; but after she told him that something had happened to her he never came again. When she made enquiries she found he had given her a false name and address, and so she lost sight of him.

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