or sympathised with him or ran for the
liniment. So by luncheon time he was drinking Jimmie's champagne again
with the utmost good humour.

One of the most amusing things we did was to go after dinner in little
boats and form part of the river audience in front of some other
house-boat where something was going on,--crowded in between other
boats, having to ship our oars and pull ourselves along by our
neighbours' gunwales, getting locked for perhaps half an hour, until
suddenly our Geisha girls or niggers would start the cry "Up river,"
when away we would all go, entertainers and entertained, pulling up the
river to the lights of another house-boat, enjoying the music for a few
minutes and then slipping away in the darkness toward the lights of
Henley village, or perhaps back to the _Lulu_.

Once or twice a boat would capsize, giving the occupants a severe
wetting, but as river costumes are always washable and the river is not
deep, no harm ever seemed to come of these aquatic diversions. Once,
however, it was brought near home in this wise.

Jimmie invited his wife to go canoeing. I went canoeing once on the
Kennebunk River with an Indian to paddle, and after watching the
manoeuvres of the paddlers on the Thames and the antics of those
wretched little boats, I made the solemn promise with myself never to
trust any one less skilled than an Indian again. But Jimmie, while he is
not more conceited than most people, is what you might call confident,
and he would have been all right in this instance, if he had noticed
that a race had just been rowed and that the swell from the racers was
just rippling over the boom and creeping gently toward the house-boat.
The canoe was still at the house-boat steps. They were both seated
comfortably and just about to paddle away when a swell came alongside
and tilted the canoe in such a succession of little unexpected rolls
that our two friends, in their anxiety to hold on to something which
was not there to hold on to, overbalanced, and the canoe shipped enough
water to submerge their legs entirely, giving them a nice cold hip bath.

Mrs. Jimmie screamed, and we all rushed down and fished her out of the
boat dripping like a mermaid and thoroughly chilled. Bee took her in to
warm her with a brandy and to hurry her into dry clothes, while I
remained to see what I could do for Jimmie, who was very wet, very mad,
and very uncommunicative.

"What a pity," I remarked, pleasantly, "that y