Consequently, in addition to abundance of fruit, and although it was so close in the town, there was always a chorus of song in the season; and even the nightingale came from the woodlands across the river and sang within the orchard, through which the river ran.
That river alone half made the place, for it was one of those useless rivers, so commercial men called it, where the most you could do was pleasure-boating; barges only being able to ascend to Coleby Bridge, a sort of busy colony from the town, two miles nearer the sea.
“Yes, sir,” Sir James Danby had been known to say, “if the river could be deepened right through the town it would be the making of the place.”
“And the spoiling of my grounds,” said the doctor, “so I’m glad it runs over the solid rock.”
This paradise of a garden was the one into which Dexter darted, and in which Dan’l Copestake was grumbling that morning—
“Like a bear with a sore head, that’s what I say,” said Peter Cribb to the under-gardener. “Nothing never suits him.”
“Yes, it do,” said Dan’l, showing a very red face over a clump of rhododendron. “Master said you was to come into the garden three days a week, and last week I only set eyes on you twice, and here’s half the week gone and you’ve only been once.”
“Look here,” said Peter Cribb, a hard-looking bullet-headed man of five-and-twenty; and he leaned on his broom, and twisted one very tightly trousered leg round the other, “do you think I can sit upon the box o’ that there wagginette, drivin’ miles away, and be sweeping this here lawn same time!”
“Master said as it was your dooty to be in this garden three days a week; and t’other three days you was to do your stable-work—there.”
“Didn’t I go out with the carriage every day this week?”