s rather a
nuisance in a boat. It gets so soppy when it's the least wet. There's
no use having more of it than we can help. Peaches. He hadn't any of the
small one and sixpenny tins, so I had to spend your other shilling to
make up the half-crown for the big one. I hope you don't mind. We shall
be able to finish it all right I expect. Oh, bother! I forgot that the
peaches require a tin-opener. Have you a knife? If you have we may be
able to manage by hammering it along through the lid of the tin with a
rowlock."

Frank had a knife, but he set some value on it He did not want to have
it reduced to the condition of a coarse toothed saw by being hammered
through a tin with a rowlock. He hesitated.

"All right," said Priscilla, "if you'd rather not have it used I'll go
and try to stick Brannigan for the loan of a tin-opener. He may not care
for lending it, because things like tin-openers generally drop overboard
and then of course he wouldn't get it back. But he'll hardly be able to
refuse it I offer to deposit the safety pin in my tie as a hostage. It
looks exactly as if it is gold, and, if it was, would be worth far more
than any tin-opener."

She went into the shop again. It was nearly ten minutes before she
came out. Frank was seriously annoyed by a number of small children who
crowded round the bath-chair and made remarks about his appearance. He
tried to buy them off with macaroons, but the plan failed, as a similar
one did in the case of the Anglo-Saxon king and the Danes. The children,
like the Norse pirates, returned almost immediately in increased
numbers. Then Priscilla appeared.

"I thought I should have had a frightful rag with Brannigan over the
tin-opener," she said, "but he was quite nice about it. He said he'd
lend it with pleasure and didn't care whether I left him the safety pin
or not. The only trouble was that he couldn't find one. He said that he
had a gross of them somewhere, but he didn't know where they'd been put.
In the end it was Mrs. Brannigan who found them in an old biscuit tin
under some oilskins. That's what delayed me."

Peter Walsh was hoisting a sail, a gunter lug, on the _Tortoise_.
He paused in his work now and then to cast a glance ashore at Frank.
Priscilla wheeled the bath-chair down to the slip and hailed Peter.

"Hurry up now," she said, "and get the foresail on her. Don't keep us
here all day."

Peter pulled on the foresail halyards with some appearance of vigour.
He slip