The trumpetmajor - 1880 Author:Thomas Hardy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. IN WHICH THE MILL BECOMES AN IMPORTANT CENTRE OF OPERATIONS. '"PHE next morning Miss Garland awoke with an im- J. pression that something more... more » than usual was going on, and she recognized as soon as she could clearly reason that the proceedings, whatever they might be, lay not far away from her bedroom window. The sounds were chiefly those of pickaxes and shovels. Anne got up, and, lifting the corner of the curtain about an inch, peeped out. A number of soldiers were busily engaged in making a zigzag path down the incline from the camp to the river head at the back of the house, and judging from the quantity of work already got through, they must have begun very early. Squads of men were working at several equidistant points in the proposed pathway, and by the time that Anne had dressed herself each section of the length had been connected with those above and below it, so that a continuous and easy track was formed from the crest of the down to the bottom of the steep. The down rested on a bed of solid chalk, and the surface exposed by the road-makers formed a white ribbon, serpentining from top to bottom. Then the relays of working soldiers all disappeared; and, not long after, a troop of dragoons in watering order rode forward at the top and began to wind down the new path. They came lower and closer, and at last were iramediately beneath her window, gathering themselves up on the space by the mill-pond. A number of the horses entered it at the shallow part, drinking, and splashing, and tossing about. Perhaps as many as thirty, half of them with riders on their backs, were in the water at one time; the thirsty animals drank, stamped, flounced, and drank again, letting the clear, cool water dribble luxuriously from their mouths. Miller Loveday was looking...« less