is well worth
taking, being a pretty, shady little piece of stream, besides saving
nearly half a mile of distance.

Of course, its entrance is studded with posts and chains, and surrounded
with notice boards, menacing all kinds of torture, imprisonment, and
death to everyone who dares set scull upon its waters--I wonder some of
these riparian boors don't claim the air of the river and threaten
everyone with forty shillings fine who breathes it--but the posts and
chains a little skill will easily avoid; and as for the boards, you
might, if you have five minutes to spare, and there is nobody about, take
one or two of them down and throw them into the river.

Half-way up the backwater, we got out and lunched; and it was during this
lunch that George and I received rather a trying shock.

Harris received a shock, too; but I do not think Harris's shock could
have been anything like so bad as the shock that George and I had over
the business.

You see, it was in this way: we were sitting in a meadow, about ten yards
from the water's edge, and we had just settled down comfortably to feed.
Harris had the beefsteak pie between his knees, and was carving it, and
George and I were waiting with our plates ready.

"Have you got a spoon there?" says Harris; "I want a spoon to help the
gravy with."

The hamper was close behind us, and George and I both turned round to
reach one out. We were not five seconds getting it. When we looked
round again, Harris and the pie were gone!

It was a wide, open field. There was not a tree or a bit of hedge for
hundreds of yards. He could not have tumbled into the river, because we
were on the water side of him, and he would have had to climb over us to
do it.

George and I gazed all about. Then we gazed at each other.

"Has he been snatched up to heaven?" I queried.

"They'd hardly have taken the pie too," said George.

There seemed weight in this objection, and we discarded the heavenly
theory.

"I suppose the truth of the matter is," suggested George, descending to
the commonplace and practicable, "that there has been an earthquake."

And then he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice: "I wish he
hadn't been carving that pie."

With a sigh, we turned our eyes once more towards the spot where Harris
and the pie had last been seen on earth; and there, as our blood froze in
our veins and our hair stood up on end, we saw Harris's head--and nothing
but his head--sticking bol