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Previous to the inception of the ceremonies, a number of the women were set at work with large wooden mallets, pounding the turf, which was done in order to make the ground hard, smooth and level.
James's Street, or taking tea in country rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned voices which could recite a passage from Ovid with cultured diction; purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once "gone through the Guards," before spending their week-ends at Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by their martial manners.
By the time the Riverses were gone home, and the Ernescliffes and Harry off by the train, there were still four mortal hours of daylight, and oh! for Mary's power of making every one happy! Caroline and Annie Cheviot were ladylike, nice-looking girls; but when they found no croquet mallets in the garden, they seemed at a loss what life had to offer at Stoneborough!
They came once more to Boston, bought the house next to Chief Justice Hutchinson, and lived very happily. "We will go down to father's shipyard," said Tom, "and you can see the carpenters at work building a ship." They descended the hill and entered the yard. Robert hardly knew what to think as he listened to the clattering of axes and mallets.
From the bay-window Edwin could see over the hedge, and also through it, on to the croquet lawn of the Orgreaves. Croquet was then in its first avatar; nothing was more dashing than croquet. With rag-balls and home-made mallets the Clayhanger children had imitated croquet in their yard in the seventies. The Orgreaves played real croquet; one of them had shone in a tournament at Buxton.
The great wheel, which drove the whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill a word Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and of their motion to walking with the water plashing and squirting from the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound each was haunted in its turn and season.
Unknown men leading armed troops, and themselves armed with hatchets, mallets, pincers, crow-bars, life-preservers, swords hidden under their coats, pistols, of which the butts could be distinguished under the folds of their cloaks, arrived in silence before a house, occupied the street, encircled the approaches, picked the lock of the door, tied up the porter, invaded the stairs, and burst through the doors upon a sleeping man, and when that man, awakening with a start, asked of these bandits, "Who are you?" their leader answered, "A Commissary of Police."
In the first division are some palm-leaf baskets; wooden mallets, one found in the masonry of the great pyramid at Abooseir; and staves; in the second division a large variety of curious tools is exhibited, including Egyptian saws, bradawls, chisels, an adze, axe blades, knives of bronze, generally inscribed with hieroglyphics, hones, bronze nails; mysterious bronze tools, the use of which is unknown, all interesting to those who are in any way interested in the history of the wonderful people who inhabited the valley of the Nile, and wielded these tools there, when our island was an untilled desert.
Then when the first confusion was over, when hunger and thirst were satisfied, the tents were unpacked with their poles, and the sound of the great wooden mallets striking upon the tent-pegs was like the irregular pounding stroke of the fullers' hammers as the water-wheel makes them rise and fall; and though the army had crossed Europe and had encamped in many places, the colours of the tents were bright still, and the pennants floated in streaks of vivid colour against the sky.
Here a long dark tunnel opens into sunlight and shops on each side, with great vines trailed on trellis-work like a pergola overhead, and sunlight in blotches on the cobbled paving below: there, just beyond, the Slipper Quarter, and we find ourselves in the thick of the tap-tap of the mallets on the hard-hammered leather dozens of busy little shops on each side, lined with yellow matting, and hung from top to floor with rows of lemon-yellow slippers for the men, rose-red slippers for women, embroidered slippers for the wealthy, crimson slippers for slaves, slippers with heel-pieces and slippers without.
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