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A highly respectable couple, but of plainer pretensions than the De Mousas, reside in Cypress Cottage, a small house in the adjacent Gravel-pits, Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Tabitha Tortoshell, with a family of one son and two daughters. Mr. De Mousa is of foreign extraction, but Mr. Tortoshell claims him as a cousin by his mother's side, and is not a little proud of the relationship.
They both went in a great hurry, and when they were gone the house seemed dreadfully quiet and empty, and the children wandered from one room to another and looked at the bits of paper and string on the floors left over from the packing, and not yet cleared up, and wished they had something to do. It was Cyril who said: 'I say, let's take our Margate spades and go and dig in the gravel-pits.
Richard settled his shoulders squarely against the straight, stuffed back of the Chippendale sofa, and talked on. "It's a pity that bit is burnt," he said. "I haven't been over that ground for nearly six years, of course. But I remember there were very good trees there a plantation at the top end, just before you come to the big gravel-pits, and the rest self-sown. Are they all gone?"
"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as he had got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here for I have always heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the place he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognised Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed him; and Lovelock rode up to meet him.
Whether he adopted my suggestion, or his land remains in the same condition now as then, I don't know; but if it does, I would just suggest to him and to all landed proprietors who own stiff clay lands, if they are near to gravel-pits, to try a small portion by gravelling it freely, and let us hear the results. December 2nd, 1871. June 1st, 1842.
There were gullies and ravines, and holes like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the field.
"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as he had got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here for I have always heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the place he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognised Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed him; and Lovelock rode up to meet him.
Beyond the gravel-pits the trail turned and followed the flank of the slope, level here for nearly a mile. Lockwood set his teeth against the agony of his foot and gave the bronco the quirt with all his strength. In another half-hour he had passed Cold Canon, and twenty minutes after that had begun the descent into Indian River.
Out of the garden-gate walked he, and down the dirty lane, setting his cane down stoutly as he went, past gravel-pits and pens to Southam's lane, and in at the door of Simon Attwood's tannery. It was noon when he went in; yet the hour struck, and no one came or went from the tannery. Mistress Attwood's dinner grew cold upon the board, and Dame Combe looked vainly across the fields toward the town.
I resolved therefore to visit a little house of mine in the country, which stands at Ealing, in the county of Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom, and far superior to that of Kensington Gravel-pits; for the gravel is here much wider and deeper, the place higher and more open towards the south, whilst it is guarded from the north wind by a ridge of hills, and from the smells and smoke of London by its distance; which last is not the fate of Kensington, when the wind blows from any corner of the east.
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