“Bless me,” Mrs. Holl said, “what a head I have got, to be sure! I do declare I have not told you a word about it, for it slipped clean out of my mind. You are quite right, John, you do smell spiced beer, for Evan has been drinking it. The boy has been in the Serpentine, and came home that wet you could have squeezed the water out of him by the pailful.” “In the Serpentine!” John Holl exclaimed; “I heard that the ice was too thin to think of going on it. Why, Evan, that was not like you, not a bit, you are generally steady enough. How did you get in? Some foolery, I’ll wager a pot of beer.” In answer to this appeal from his father, Evan related what had happened; the others gathering round him, and the young ones even leaving off eating their supper to listen, and breaking in with many exclamations of astonishment as he proceeded. “It was very wrong, Evan,” his mother said, “you might have got yourself drownded, and what should we have said then? Why, Lor, you might have gone under the ice, and we should never have known nothing about what had become of you, till they brought your tray of lollipops home. That would be all we should have had left of you. What should we have done?” Mrs. Holl began to weep aloud at the picture she had raised; the younger children immediately followed her example, and required so much pacifying that it was some time before quiet was restored. “Lor bless you, mother,” Evan said, “there is no call to take on about it. I was not going to get drowned close to the shore; besides, there was a gentleman, who got ready to come in for me, if I had sung out for help; and he would have done it too. I could see he meant it.” “It were a risky job,” John Holl said; “a plaguy risky job. I ain’t going for to say as you are altogether wrong, Evan, but it were certainly risky.” “You were quite right, Evan,” a voice said warmly, “quite right, and I would give a good deal, if I had it, to have been in your place, and to have done something one could look back with pleasure upon, if only for once in my life.” The speaker was a lad of about seventeen, who has not yet been described, and yet he was of all these the person who would have first fixed the attention of any incomer.