slimy. Gypsy had a strong impression that a frog jumped into her neck when
she plunged, head first, into the deep mud at the bottom. After a little
splashing and gasping, she regained her feet, and stood up to her elbows
in the water. But what she could do, Winnie could not. He had sunk in the
soft mud, and even if he had had the courage to stand up straight, the
water would have been above his head. But it had never occurred to him to
do otherwise than lie gasping and flat on the bottom, where he was
drowning as fast as he possibly could.

Gypsy pulled him out and carried him ashore. She wrung him out a little,
and set him down on the grass, and then, by way of doing something, she
took her dripping handkerchief out of her dripping pocket and wiped her
hands on it.

"O--o--oh!" gasped Winnie; "I never did--you'd ought to know--you've just
gone'n drownded me!"

"What a story!" said Gypsy; "you're no more drowned than I am. To be sure
you _are_ rather wet," she added, with a disconsolate attempt at a laugh.

"You oughtn't to have tooken me out on that old raft," glared Winnie,
through the shower of water-drops that rained down from his forehead, "you
know you hadn't! I'll just tell mother. I'll get sick and be died after
it, you see if I don't."

"Very well," said Gypsy, giving herself a little shake, very much as a
pretty brown spaniel would do, who had been in swimming.

"You may do as you like. Who teased to go on the raft, I'd like to know?"