‘Your papa’s hat,’ she called, flashing to her daughter, and streamed up the lawn into the rose-trellised pathways leading on aloft to the vicarage house.  Behind roses the weeping couple disappeared.  The last I saw of my friend was a smiting of his hand upon his head in a vain effort to catch at one of the fleeting ideas sowed in him by the quick passage of objects before his vision, and shaken out of him by abnormal hurry.  The Rev. Abraham Amble had been lord of his wife in the water, but his innings was over.  He had evidently enjoyed it vastly, and I now understood why he had chosen to prolong it as much as possible.  Your eccentric characters are not uncommonly amateurs of petty artifice.  There are hours of vengeance even for henpecked men.

I found myself sighing over the enslaved condition of every Benedict of my acquaintance, when the thought came like a surprise that I was alone with Alice.  The fair and pleasant damsel made a clever descent into the boat, and having seated herself, she began to twirl the scull in the rowlock, and said:  ’Do you feel disposed to join me in looking after the other scull and papa’s hat, Mr. Pollingray?’ I suggested ’Will you not get your feet wet?  I couldn’t manage to empty all the water in the boat.’

‘Oh’ cried she, with a toss of her head; I wet feet never hurt young people.’

There was matter for an admonitory lecture in this.  Let me confess I was about to give it, when she added:  But Mr. Pollingray, I am really afraid that your feet are wet!  You had to step into the water when you righted the boat: 

My reply was to jump down by her side with as much agility as I could combine with a proper discretion.  The amateur craft rocked threateningly, and I found myself grasped by and grasping the pretty damsel, until by great good luck we were steadied and preserved from the same misfortune which had befallen her parents.  She laughed and blushed, and we tottered asunder.

‘Would you have talked metaphysics to me in the water, Mr. Pollingray?’

Alice was here guilty of one of those naughty sort of innocent speeches smacking of Eve most strongly; though, of course, of Eve in her best days.

I took the rudder lines to steer against the sculling of her single scull, and was Adam enough to respond to temptation:  ’I should perhaps have been grateful to your charitable construction of it as being metaphysics.’

She laughed colloquially, to fill a pause.  It had not been coquetry:  merely the woman unconsciously at play.  A man is bound to remember the seniority of his years when this occurs, for a veteran of ninety and a worn out young debauchee will equally be subject to it if they do not shun the society of the sex.  My long robust health and perfect self-reliance apparently tend to give me unguarded moments, or lay me open to fitful impressions.  Indeed there are times when I fear I have the heart of a boy, and certainly