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Before them the Blue Nile, shining in the early sunlight like a silver band, flowed swiftly; and beyond its nearest waters rose a long, bare, gravel island crowned with clumps of sandhills, to the shelter of which several hundred Dervishes, surprised by the sudden arrival of the troops, were scampering.
Scarcely had I finished the slice of toast and single cup of tea that constitute my morning meal, before I heard the tramp of a horse on the gravel in front of the house, followed by the ominous sound of the door-bell. I have remarked that in all country families a ring at the door-bell brings everybody's heart into everybody's mouth.
Dunstan's, I, for a time, felt that never again should I be able to step out into the world except with halting step and a horror of what might happen. The management of the institution had constructed an elaborate system of gravel paths, along which were wooden palings which would prevent the students losing their way.
It was pitch dark when I came outside, and the wind blew with such violence that I had to put my shoulder against it and push my way along the shingle. My face pringled and smarted with the sting of the gravel which was blown against it, and the red ashes of my pipe streamed away behind me, dancing fantastically through the darkness.
A small garden sprinkled over with a scattered eruption of sickly plants separated each of these houses from the street, and was traversed by a narrow pathway, yellowish in colour, and consisting apparently of a mixture of clay and of gravel. The whole place was very sloppy from the rain which had fallen through the night.
And when she heard the stranger's feet upon the gravel she composed her face; and when he appeared round the corner of a clipped yew she rattled the keys at her belt and bustled on her feet, as becomes a housekeeper, and bobbed a courtesy. The stranger McTavish was no more than thirty. He had brown eyes, and wore upon his face a steady, enigmatic smile. "Good-morning," said the American McTavish.
Just beyond this point they receded again and terminated abruptly in a sort of circle or amphitheatre, the floor of which could not have been more than thirty yards in diameter, and was covered with small gravel; the sides were quite perpendicular, and rose so high that on looking up one felt as if one had got into the bottom of a natural tunnel, at the top of which a round bit of bright blue sky sent down a few scanty rays of light.
With a crunching of the small stones in the gravel drive, the big car swung around to the side entrance of the house, and came to a stop, with a whining, screeching and, generally protesting sound of the brake-bands. A girl, bronzed by the summer sun, let her gloved hands fall from the steering wheel, for she had driven fast, and was tired.
The middle of the high causeways to be paved with stone, chalk, or gravel, and kept always two feet higher than the sides, that the water might have a free course into the ditches; and persons kept in constant employ to fill up holes, let out water, open drains, and the like, as there should be occasion a proper work for highwaymen and such malefactors, as might on those services be exempted from the gallows.
He had found that after all he could do something better than anybody else on the Green Meadows, for in his heart he knew that none could dig so fast as he. Johnny Chuck pushed up the last bit of gravel from the hole he had dug between the roots of the old apple tree in a corner of the Green Meadows. He smoothed it down on the big, yellow mound he had made in front of his door.
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