er with so
much delight that after a minute or so he must needs lie on his back
and kick. He splashed away, one leg after the other, with his face
turned towards the shore, and was just on the point of rolling over
for another swim, when, as he lifted a leg for one last kick, his
eyes fell on the boat. And there on the top of his clothes, in the
stern of her, sat my grandfather sucking a pipe.

Bligh let down his legs and stood up, touching bottom, but neck-deep
in water.

"Hi, you there!" he sings out.

"Wee, wee, parleyvou!" my grandfather answers, making use of pretty
well all the French he knew.

"Confound you, Sir, for an impident dirty dog! What in the name of
jiminy"--I can't give you, Sir, the exact words, for my grandfather
could never be got to repeat 'em--"What in the name of jiminy d'ee
mean by sitting on my clothes!"

"Wee, wee," my grandfather took him up, calm as you please.
"You shocked me dreadful yesterday with your blasphemious talk: but
now, seeing 'tis French, I don't mind so much. Take your time: but
when you come out you go to prison. Wee, wee--preeson," says my
grandfather.

"Are you drunk?" yells Bligh. "Get off my clothes this instant, you
hobnailed son of a something-or-other!" And he began striding for
shore.

"In the name of His Majesty King George the Third I charge you to
come along quiet," says my grandfather, picking up a stretcher.

Bligh, being naked and unarmed, casts a look round for some way to
help himself. He was a plucky fellow enough in a fight, as I've
said: but I leave you to guess what he felt like when to right and
left of him the bushes parted, and forth stepped half a dozen men in
black suits with black silk weepers a foot and a half wide tied in
great bunches round their hats. These were Sam Trewhella, of course,
and the rest of the funeral-party, that had left the coffin in a nice
shady spot inside the Vicarage garden gate, and come along to assist
the law. They had brought along pretty nearly all the menkind of the
parish beside: but these, being in their work-a-day clothes, didn't
appear, and for a reason you'll learn by and by. All that Bligh saw
was this dismal company of mourners backed by a rabble of
school-children, the little ones lining the shore and staring at him
fearsomely with their fingers in their mouths.

For the moment Bligh must have thought himself dreaming. But there
they stood, the men in black and the crowd of children, and