acknowledged his right of way across the road. His
sympathies remained unentangled. If people navigated, it was their own
look out. You see, these people were navvies, or navigators, although it
strains one's sense of language to describe them so.

The best of it was to come. For in time the lowest navvy was threatened
with death by misadventure, unless he come up time enough to avoid the
water. The small pump the job had been making shift with was obliged to
acknowledge itself beaten, and to make way for one with two handles,
each with room for two pumpers; and this in turn was discarded in favour
of a noisy affair with a donkey-engine, which brought up the yellow
stream as fast as ever a gutter of nine-inch plank, nailed up to a =V=,
would carry it away. And it really was a most extraordinary thing that
of all those navigators there was not one that had not predicted in
detail exactly the course of events that had come about. Mr. Bloxam, the
foreman, had told the governor that there would be no harm in having the
pump handy, seeing they would go below the clay. And each of the others
had--so they themselves said--spoken in the same sense, in some cases
using a most inappropriate adjective to qualify the expected flood.
Why, even Sleepy Joe had seen that! Sleepy Joe was this same foreman,
and he lived in a wooden hutch on the job, called The Office.

But the watershed of any engine--whatever may be its donkey-power, and
whatever that name implies--slops back where a closed spout changes
suddenly to an open gutter, and sets up independent lakes and rivers.
This one sent its overflow towards Sapps Court, the incline favouring
its distribution along the gutter of the _cul-de-sac_, which lay a
little lower than the main street it opened out of. Its rich, ochrous
rivulets--containing no visible trace of haemorrhage, in spite of that
abuse of an adjective--were creeping slowly along the interstices of
cobblestone paving that still outlived the incoming of Macadam, when
Dave and Dolly Wardle ventured out of their archway to renew a survey,
begun the previous day, of the fascinating excavation in the main
street.

Here was an opportunity for active and useful service not to be lost.
Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came
ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment
to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian
lava, on the line of least resistan