the
darkness. We began to understand the sufferings of the Babes in the
Wood.

Just when we had given up all hope--yes, I know that is always the time
that things do happen in novels and tales; but I can't help it. I
resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly
truthful in all things; and so I will be, even if I have to employ
hackneyed phrases for the purpose.

It _was_ just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so.
Just when we had given up all hope, then, I suddenly caught sight, a
little way below us, of a strange, weird sort of glimmer flickering among
the trees on the opposite bank. For an instant I thought of ghosts: it
was such a shadowy, mysterious light. The next moment it flashed across
me that it was our boat, and I sent up such a yell across the water that
made the night seem to shake in its bed.

We waited breathless for a minute, and then--oh! divinest music of the
darkness!--we heard the answering bark of Montmorency. We shouted back
loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers--I never could understand myself
why it should take more noise to wake seven sleepers than one--and, after
what seemed an hour, but what was really, I suppose, about five minutes,
we saw the lighted boat creeping slowly over the blackness, and heard
Harris's sleepy voice asking where we were.

There was an unaccountable strangeness about Harris. It was something
more than mere ordinary tiredness. He pulled the boat against a part of
the bank from which it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and
immediately went to sleep. It took us an immense amount of screaming and
roaring to wake him up again and put some sense into him; but we
succeeded at last, and got safely on board.

Harris had a sad expression on him, so we noticed, when we got into the
boat. He gave you the idea of a man who had been through trouble. We
asked him if anything had happened, and he said--

[Picture: Swans] "Swans!"

It seemed we had moored close to a swan's nest, and, soon after George
and I had gone, the female swan came back, and kicked up a row about it.
Harris had chivied her off, and she had gone away, and fetched up her old
man. Harris said he had had quite a fight with these two swans; but
courage and skill had prevailed in the end, and he had defeated them.

Half-an-hour afterwards they returned with eighteen other swans! It must
have been a fearful battle, so far as we could understand