if that is a lamentable matter, a loss of certain of our young tricks at
fifty. We have ceased to blush readily: and let me ask you to define a
blush. Is it an involuntary truth or an ingenuous lie? I know that this
will sound like the language of a man not a little jealous of his
youthful compeers. I can but leave it to rightly judging persons to
consider whether a healthy man in his prime, who has enough, and is not
cursed by ambition, need be jealous of any living soul.

A shriek from Miss Alice checked my retreating steps. The vicar was
staggering to support the breathing half of his partner while she
regained her footing in the bed of the river. Their effort to scale the
camshot had failed. Happily at this moment I caught sight of Master
Frank's boat, which had floated, bottom upwards, against a projecting
mud-bank of forget-me-nots. I contrived to reach it and right it, and
having secured one of the sculls, I pulled up to the rescue; though not
before I had plucked a flower, actuated by a motive that I cannot account
for. The vicar held the boat firmly against the camshot, while I, at the
imminent risk of joining them (I shall not forget the combined expression
of Miss Alice's retreating eyes and the malicious corners of her mouth)
hoisted the lady in, and the river with her. From the seat of the boat
she stood sufficiently high to project the step towards land without
peril. When she had set her foot there, we all assumed an attitude of
respectful attention, and the vicar, who could soar over calamity like a
fairweather swallow, acknowledged the return of his wife to the element
with a series of apologetic yesses and short coughings.

'That would furnish a good concert for the poets,' he remarked.
'A parting, a separation of lovers; "even as a body from the watertorn,"
or "from the water plucked"; eh? do you think--"so I weep round her,
tearful in her track," an excellent--'