THE LITTLE NATIONS
victorious and held it for awhile, and then retreated; the Doctor could not quite make out the reason of this.
**
He started violently when his man called to him. Roberts said he had called for five minutes without getting an answer, and that the Dean was in a hurry, with only five minutes to spare. So the Prebendary went into the house in a kind of dwam, as the Scots put it, and had no notion of what the Dean had to say. And when he got back to the garden he found his gardener smoothing the plot with a long rake, and raking in a lot of dead ants with the mould. The gardener said it was boys; but the Doctor talked in such a way to the Custos that night that the Custos, reading his paper a fortnight later, began to think that the old Prebendary was a prophet.
**
109
