was like this: I followed him down to the
pier very early before breakfast, and you remember where the
man was fishing and caught nothing that day? Well, what does
Jeremiah do but just walk plump over the edge. I had all but
got to him, by good luck, and of course I went straight for
him and caught him before he sank. I induced him not to kick
and flounder, and got him inside a life-belt they threw from
the pier, and then I settled to leave him alone and swim to
the steps, because you've no idea how I felt my clothes, and
it would have been all right, only a horrible heavy petticoat
got loose and demoralised me. I don't know how it happened,
but I got all wrong somehow, and a breaker caught me. _Don't
get drowned_, Tishy; or, if you do, _don't be revived again_!
I don't know which is worst, but I think reviving. I can't
write about it. I'll tell you when I come back.

"They won't tell me how long I was coming to, but it must have
been much longer than I thought, when one comes to think of
it. Only I can't tell, because when poor dear Prosy had got me
to[A]--down at Lloyd's Coffeehouse, where old Simon sits all
day--and I had been wrapped up in what I heard a Scotchman
call 'weel-warmed blawnkets,' and brought home in a closed fly
from Padlock's livery stables, I went off sound asleep with my
fingers and toes tingling, and never knew the time nor
anything. (Continuation bit.) This is being written, to tell
you the truth, in the small hours of the morning, in secrecy
with a guttering candle. It seems to have been really quite
a terrible alarm to poor darling mother and Jeremiah, and much
about the same to my medical adviser, who resuscitated me on
Marshall Hall's system, followed by Silvester's, and finally
opened a vein. And there was I alive all the time, and not
grateful to Prosy at all, I can tell you, for bringing me to.
I have requested not to be brought to next time. The oddity
of it all was indescribable. And there, now I come to think
of it, I've never so much as seen the Octopus since Prosy and
I got engaged. I shall have to go round as soon as I'm up.
(Later continuation bit--after breakfast.) Do you know, it
makes me quite miserable to think what an anxiety I've been to
all of them! Mother and J. can't take their eyes off me, and
look quite wasted and resigne