Determined to put up with the neglect no longer, she gave a vigorous pull at the rope. Thump went the catch, and instantly down, through the colander above, came a miniature deluge, consisting of two pailsful of “cold pump,” suddenly let loose, in the form of a thousand watery wires, upon the head of the luckless Mrs. Sandboys. What with the unexpectedness of the catastrophe, and the coldness of the water—rendered still more cold by the minuteness of its division—and the rapidity of its descent through the air, together with the perfectly novel character of the bath to the unsophisticated native of Buttermere, the poor lady was so perfectly paralysed by the icy torrent, that she was unable to escape from it; and it was not until a few moments after the cataract had ceased that she rushed out of the balneatory cupboard, gasping for breath, and fighting the air; while her clothes, shining with the wet, like a tarpaulin clung about her as tight as if she had been done up in brown paper, and her hair hung in skeins over her face, so that she had very much of the soaked appearance of a Polish hen on a rainy day. As soon as she could fetch sufficient breath to scream, she gave a series of shrieks, and capered about the apartment after the manner of the war-dance of the wild Indians. The peal of screams were echoed and re-echoed as they rattled against the bare walls of the building, and spread an instant alarm among the entire corps of ladies then in the bathing-rooms. One and all they imagined, from the piercing tone of the shrieks, that nothing less could have occurred than that some brute of a man—some impudent Frenchmen, or a wretch of a Turk perhaps—through accident or design—had found his way to the ladies’ side of the establishment, and taken some poor dear by surprise. Accordingly they, one after another, repeated the screams of the original screamer—shouting, “It’s a man! It’s a man! It’s a man!” In an instant the female attendant came rushing down the corridor. Such of the lady bathers as were dressed suddenly opened the doors of their little apartments, and stood with them ajar, so that they might slam them to again in case of danger; while those who were unable to make their appearance, jumped upon the bench within, and popped their bald-looking heads, encased as they were in yellow greasy-looking bathing-caps, over the doors, and squinted into the passage like so many birds from the house-tops; and as they saw the male authorities come hurrying towards the point of alarm, they each uttered a sudden “Ho!” and bobbed down again into the privacy of their cabins, as jauntily as so many “Jacks-in-the-box.”