cabin. No more music!" added Mrs. Pentecost, shaking her
forefinger at the proprietor of the concertina--"unless it's a hymn, and
that I don't object to."

Nobody appearing to be in a fit frame of mind for singing a hymn, the
all-accomplished Pedgift drew upon his stores of local knowledge, and
produced a new idea. The course of the boat was immediately changed
under his direction. In a few minutes more, the company found themselves
in a little island creek, with a lonely cottage at the far end of it,
and a perfect forest of reeds closing the view all round them. "What do
you say, ladies and gentlemen, to stepping on shore and seeing what a
reed-cutter's cottage looks like?" suggested young Pedgift.

"We say yes, to be sure," answered Allan. "I think our spirits have been
a little dashed by Mr. Pentecost's illness and Mrs. Pentecost's bag," he
added, in a whisper to Miss Milroy. "A change of this sort is the very
thing we want to set us all going again."

He and young Pedgift handed Miss Milroy out of the boat. The major
followed. Mrs. Pentecost sat immovable as the Egyptian Sphinx, with her
bag on her knees, mounting guard over "Sammy" in the cabin.

"We must keep the fun going, sir," said Allan, as he helped the major
over the side of the boat. "We haven't half done yet with the enjoyment
of the day."

His voice seconded his hearty belief in his own prediction to such good
purpose that even Mrs. Pentecost heard him, and ominously shook her
head.

"Ah!" sighed the curate's mother, "if you were as old as I am, young
gentleman, you wouldn't feel quite so sure of the enjoyment of the day!"

So, in rebuke of the rashness of youth, spoke the caution of age. The
negative view is notoriously the safe view, all the world over, and the
Pentecost philosophy is, as a necessary consequence, generally in the
right.

IX. FATE OR CHANCE?

It was close on six o'clock when Allan and his friends left the boat,
and the evening influence was creeping already, in its mystery and its
stillness, over the watery solitude of the Broads.

The shore in these wild regions was not like the shore elsewhere. Firm
as it looked, the garden ground in front of the reed-cutter's cottage
was floating ground, that rose and fell and oozed into puddles under the
pressure of the foot. The boatmen who guided the visitors warned them to
keep to the path, and pointed through gaps in the reeds and pollards to
grassy places, on which strangers w