Before Mr. Barlow could take advantage of her invitation, however, the dowser had passed out through the little kitchen into the yard behind, where, stumbling along over Annie's pots and pans and other utensils, which were everywhere but where they ought to be, he stopped short at a high privet fence, neatly clipped; for with the backyard Annie's dominion ended and Tom's began, so the fences and the gate and the palings were in good order. There was no getting over this fence; it ran all the length of the row of houses. The dowser retraced his steps, and led by Mr. Barlow soon reappeared by a circuitous route at the opposite side of the fence. Annie and her children made a big hole in the dusty green of it and peered through.
Behind this hedge was a small piece of waste land, or common, where the boys played desultory games of cricket in the hot evenings; and when there was any feed at all on it, the few people who owned donkeys in Willowton turned them out to graze. Just now it was as hard brickbats and guiltless of any signs of green. All the way across this piece the rod jerked and twisted.
"There is water here," the dowser said, stopping and wiping his brow. He looked exhausted, and sat down on the bank that ran along the top of the rather shallow gravel-pit that gave the name to the place. "The spring is a deep one, too," he continued thoughtfully—"perhaps eighty or a hundred feet below the surface; but it is a bad place for sinking a well—too dangerous by far with all this gravel. We will try somewhere else."
At Mr. Barlow's request, however, he marked the spot with a large stone, for it was impossible to put a stick in the hard ground.
"How do you know what depth it is down, may I ask?" said the farmer politely; and the crowd of boys and girls listened eagerly for the answer, and none more eagerly than Geo, who stood a little aloof with an unusual alertness in his bearing.
"I know in this way," said the dowser, taking up his twig which he had laid down for a moment and standing over the place indicated. "I judge by the distance from it at which the rod is influenced. Deep-lying water affects a smaller area than that which is nearer the surface. My rod, as I daresay you observed, began to jerk before we reached yonder cottage," pointing back at the Chapman's house. "That must be a couple of hundred yards or more away. No," he added in answer to further questions, "I don't go by any exact scale of measurement. Other people may do so, but I don't. Experience enables me to be pretty certain about it, and I trust to that."
Geo was so intensely interested at this conversation that he could not help advancing nearer than manners permitted. The dowser noticed him.
"I think I saw you at the meeting," he said, looking kindly at him. "Have you ever seen water found like this before?"
Geo touched his hat respectfully.
"No, sir," he said, "that I hain't. That's the most wonderful thing I ever see in my life."