‘Guitar be diddled!’ cried he; ’’tis gone—­where we’re going—­to the bottom.  What devil possessed you, Sir, to drown us this way?’

Puddock sighed.  They were passing at this moment the quiet banks of the pleasant meadow of Belmont, and the lights twinkled from the bow-window in the drawing-room.  I don’t know whether Puddock saw them—­Cluffe certainly did not.

‘Hallo! hallo!—­a rope!’ cried Cluffe, who had hit upon this desperate expedient for raising the neighbourhood.  ’A rope—­a rope! hallo! hallo!—­a ro-o-o-ope!’

And Aunt Becky, who heard the wild whooping, mistook it for drunken fellows at their diversions, and delivered her sentiments in the drawing-room accordingly.

CHAPTER XLIX.

SWANS IN THE WATER.

‘We’re coming to something—­what’s that?’ said Puddock, as a long row of black stakes presented themselves at some distance ahead, in the dusky moonlight, slanting across the stream.

‘’Tis the salmon-weir!’ roared Cluffe with an oath that subsided into something like a sickening prayer.

It was only a fortnight before that a tipsy fellow had been found drowned in the net.  Cluffe had lost his head much more than Puddock, though Cluffe had fought duels.  But then, he really could not swim a bit, and he was so confoundedly buckled up.

‘Sit to the right.  Trim the boat, Sir!’ said little Puddock.

‘Trim the devil!’ bawled Cluffe, to whom this order of Puddock’s, it must be owned a useless piece of marinetism in their situation, was especially disgusting; and he added, looking furiously ahead—­’’Tisn’t the boat I’d trim, I promise you:  you—­you ridiculous murderer!’

Just then Puddock’s end of the boat touched a stone, or a post, or something in the current, and that in which Cluffe sat came wheeling swiftly round across the stream, and brought the gallant captain so near the bank that, with a sudden jerk, he caught the end of a branch that stretched far over the water, and, spite of the confounded tightness of his toilet, with the energy of sheer terror, climbed a good way; but, reaching a point where the branch forked, he could get no further, though he tugged like a brick.  But what was a fat fellow of fifty, laced, and buckled, and buttoned up, like poor Cluffe—­with his legs higher up among the foliage than his head and body—­to do, and with his right calf caught in the fork of a branch, so as to arrest all progress, and especially as the captain was plainly too much for the branch, which was drooping toward the water, and emitting sounds premonitory of a smash.

With a long, screaking crash the branch stooped down to the water, and, so soon as the old element made itself acquainted with those parts that reached it first, the gallant captain, with a sort of sob, redoubled his efforts, and down came the faithless bough, more and more perpendicularly, until his nicely got-up cue and bag, then his powdered head, and finally Captain Cluffe’s handsome features, went under the surface.  When this occurred, he instantaneously disengaged his legs with a vague feeling that his last struggle above water was over.