There were many handsome shops, the streets were wider and better kept, unsightly houses had been demolished; it was a clean, prosperous-looking town, but it was different.
Peter Reid (of London) would have been the first to carp at the tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them.

He resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the evidences of prosperity.
And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?
It had been far liker the thing, he thought--the old hump-backed bridge with the grass and ferns growing in the crannies.

He had waded in Cuddy when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had bathed in it as it wound, clear and shining, among the green meadows outside the town, and run "skirl-naked" to dry himself, in full sight of scandalised passengers in the Edinburgh train; he had slid on it in winter.

The memory of the little stream had always lain in the back of his mind as something precious--and now to find it spanned by a staring new stone bridge.

Those Town Councils with their improvements! Even Tweed Bridge had not been left alone.