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Updated: April 30, 2025
The silver sweetened his face like a charm. He seized me by the hand. "My name," he cried, "is Peter of the Pigs. I am not stable-master, but feed the grouting piglings. And yet in a way I am indeed stable-master. For the Bishop hath had no horses since the Duke took them away to mount his cavalry for the raids into Plassenburg.
We cut through the foundation wall, five feet thick, of the cell block; through twelve feet of grouting, to the outer wall of the east wing of the prison; through this wall, six feet in thickness; and four feet up near the surface of the yard, in an unfrequented place between this wing and the female department of the prison.
Once in the air chamber they could work without being discovered. With only the table-knives to work with, these men went through two solid walls, one five feet, and the other six feet in thickness. Not only that, but they went through eleven feet of grouting.
I saw those huge elephants whose long, flexible trunks were grouting and turning up the soil under the trees like a legion of serpents. I could hear the crashing noise of their long ivory tusks boring into the old decaying trunks. The boughs cracked, and the leaves torn away by cartloads went down the cavernous throats of the vast brutes.
The artificers had completed the laying of the twenty- seventh or first course of the staircase this morning, and in the evening they finished the boring, trenailing, wedging, and grouting it with mortar.
The result is to fill up all interstices and cavities, and to delay the drying of the mortar, and brickwork so treated sets extremely hard. Grouting is objected to because it interferes with the good look of the work, as it is very difficult to prevent streaks of it from running down the face, and it is apt to delay the work. But it is a valuable means of obtaining strong brickwork.
In future, owing to this wonderful invention of the grouting machine, these old bridges can be saved and made strong enough to last another five hundred years. Mr. Fox tells us that an old Westmoreland bridge in a very bad condition has been so preserved, and that the celebrated "Auld Brig o' Ayr" has been saved from destruction by this means.
If in every story of a building four or five courses are thus laid and fortified, a great deal of strength is given to the structure. Another method, which has rather fallen into disuse, is grouting. This is pouring liquid mortar, about the consistency of gruel, upon the work at about every fourth course.
Let master Moor, or whatever he is, pay attention to what he is doing, and I and my master will give him as much grouting ready to his hand, in the way of adventures and accidents of all sorts, as would make up not only one second part, but a hundred.
"And you listened and said: 'I wish he would come. He is very long. It is always long when he is away. But you never said who it was that was long away. And I shall not tell you, though I know. Perhaps it was old Jock Lacklands, who used to be captain of the guard, and perhaps grouting Peter, from the gate-house by the ford. But somehow I do not think so. Ah, that is better! Now do not cry again.
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