ing in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the
boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank
and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the
knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the
scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing
their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of
the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat
and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over,
uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went
up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat
and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the
sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and
poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought
it down.

It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that
hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes
are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have
passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the
stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast
till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

[Picture: Flattened tin] We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we
battered it into every form known to geometry--but we could not make a
hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so
strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got
frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on
the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a
mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the
thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river,
and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and
rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the
river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of
showy hotels, patronised c