“Would you be so very kind, sir,” he said to me, “to beckon a porter, as you are near the door?  I find after all that I shan’t be able to carry everything myself.”

I did as he asked; and there was so much confusion in the carriage when the porter came, that in self-defence the two friends got out with their bags.  I also descended and would have followed in the wake of the crowd, if the little man had not called after me.  He had lost his ticket, he said.  Would I be so extremely obliging as to throw an eye about the platform to see if it had fallen there?

I did oblige him in this manner, without avail; but by this time he had found the missing treasure in the folds of his travelling rug; and scrambling out of the carriage, attended by the porter I had secured for him, he would have walked by my side towards the boat, had I not dropped behind a few steps, thinking—­as always—­of the contents of that inner breast pocket.

He and I were now at the tail-end of the procession hastening boatward, or almost at the tail, for there were but four or five other passengers—­a family party with a fat nurse and crying baby—­behind us.  As I approached the gangway, I saw on deck my late travelling companions, the Jewish man and his friend, regarding us with interest.  Then, just as I was about to step on board, almost on the little man’s heels, there came a cry apparently from someone ahead:  “Look out—­gangway’s falling!”

In an instant all was confusion.  The fat nurse behind me screamed, as the nervous fellow in front leaped like a cat, intent on saving himself no matter what happened to anyone else, and flung me against the woman with the baby.  Two or three excitable Frenchmen just ahead also attempted to turn, thus nearly throwing the little man onto his knees.  The large bag which he carried hit me across the shins; in his terror he almost embraced me as he helped himself up:  the nurse, as she stumbled, pitched forward onto my shoulder, and if I had not seized the howling baby, it would certainly have fallen under our feet.

My bowler was knocked over my eyes, and though an officer of the boat cried the reassuring intelligence that it was a false alarm—­that the gangway was “all right,” and never had been anything but all right, I could not readjust my hat nor see what was going on until the fat nurse had obligingly retrieved her charge, without a word of thanks.

My first thought was for the letter-case in my pocket, for I had a horrible idea that the scare might have been got up for the express purpose of robbing me of it.  But I could feel its outline as plainly as ever under my coat, and decided, thankfully, that after all the alarm had had nothing to do with me.