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It is true, I cannot say what his first employment was; but it can be guessed; for there is no doubt that he began as an errand-boy, and that presently, growing bigger, he took a turn at driving a gravel-cart to and fro between the gravel-pits and the railway. Assuming this, I can go on to speak from my own knowledge.

Full of high hopes and excellent resolutions, they went round the safe slow cart-road to the gravel-pits, and as they went in between the mounds of gravel a sudden thought came to them, and would have turned their ruddy cheeks pale if they had been children in a book. Being real live children, it only made them stop and look at each other with rather blank and silly expressions.

Elsmere neither read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new institute sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and, miry as his own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room.

It made its skinny arms so long, and waved them so frighteningly, that the children ran as hard as they could towards the road by which carts used to come to the gravel-pits. Only Anthea had presence of mind enough to shout a timid 'Good-morning, I hope your whisker will be better to-morrow, as she ran.

A single tent stood in a gully running from one of the gravel-pits of the heath, near an iron-red rillet, and a girl of Kiomi's tribe leaned over the lazy water at half length, striking it with her handkerchief. At a distance of about twice a stone's-throw from the new carriage-road between Durstan and Bulsted, I fancied from old recollections she might be Kiomi herself.

"Now, did anyone see you at the gravel-pits, or going there, or coming back?" "No, sir." "Think well, because you may be suspected of having gone in an exactly opposite direction. If any friend was with you I am certain that he would be glad to give himself up to get you out of a really serious scrape. Shall I put it to the boys, my lord?" "It is of no use, sir," said Buller.

I have selected, as illustrating the old alluvium of the Somme occurring at levels slightly elevated above the present river, the sand and gravel-pits of Menchecourt, in the northwest suburbs of Abbeville, to which, as before stated, attention was first drawn by M. Boucher de Perthes, in his work on Celtic antiquities.

Then, at seventeen years old or so, the untrained youths begin to compete in the labour market with the men, taking too early, and at too small wages, to the driving of carts or even to work in the gravel-pits.

'I'll say I'm sorry; but anyway if it's no good it's no harm, and we know where the sandy thing is for to-morrow. The others were noble. No one reproached Robert at all. Cyril picked up the Lamb, who was now quite himself again, and off they went by the safe cart-road. The cart-road from the gravel-pits joins the road almost directly.

The gravel-pits were so called because there was no gravel there. There had been, but it was dug out, and carted away before the memory of the oldest inhabitant, and the cavities were filled with water.