One day he came down upon us with a tremendous crash.  Amenda was walking along the passage at the moment, and the result to her was that she received a violent blow first on the left side of her head and then on the right.

She was accustomed to accept one bump as a matter of course, and to regard it as an intimation from the boy that he had come; but this double knock annoyed her:  so much “style” was out of place in a mere ferry-boy.  Accordingly she went out to him in a state of high indignation.

“What do you think you are?” she cried, balancing accounts by boxing his ears first on one side and then on the other, “a torpedo!  What are you doing here at all?  What do you want?”

“I don’t want nothin’,” explained the boy, rubbing his head; “I’ve brought a gent down.”

“A gent?” said Amenda, looking round, but seeing no one.  “What gent?”

“A stout gent in a straw ’at,” answered the boy, staring round him bewilderedly.

“Well, where is he?” asked Amenda.

“I dunno,” replied the boy, in an awed voice; “‘e was a-standin’ there, at the other end of the punt, a-smokin’ a cigar.”

Just then a head appeared above the water, and a spent but infuriated swimmer struggled up between the houseboat and the bank.

“Oh, there ’e is!” cried the boy delightedly, evidently much relieved at this satisfactory solution of the mystery; “‘e must ha’ tumbled off the punt.”

“You’re quite right, my lad, that’s just what he did do, and there’s your fee for assisting him to do it.”  Saying which, my dripping friend, who had now scrambled upon deck, leant over, and following Amenda’s excellent example, expressed his feelings upon the boy’s head.

There was one comforting reflection about the transaction as a whole, and that was that the ferry-boy had at last received a fit and proper reward for his services.  I had often felt inclined to give him something myself.  I think he was, without exception, the most clumsy and stupid boy I have ever come across; and that is saying a good deal.

His mother undertook that for three-and-sixpence a week he should “make himself generally useful” to us for a couple of hours every morning.

Those were the old lady’s very words, and I repeated them to Amenda when I introduced the boy to her.

“This is James, Amenda,” I said; “he will come down here every morning at seven, and bring us our milk and the letters, and from then till nine he will make himself generally useful.”

Amenda took stock of him.

“It will be a change of occupation for him, sir, I should say, by the look of him,” she remarked.

After that, whenever some more than usually stirring crash or blood-curdling bump would cause us to leap from our seats and cry:  “What on earth has happened?” Amenda would reply:  “Oh, it’s only James, mum, making himself generally useful.”