Armorel perceived that the man beside her was quite a young man--not more than one- or two-and-twenty. He wore brave attire--even a brown velvet jacket, a white waistcoat, and a crimson necktie; he also had a soft felt hat. Nature had not yet given him much beard, but what there was of it he wore pointed, with a light moustache so arranged as to show how it would be worn when it became of a respectable length. As he sat in the boat he seemed tall; and he did not look at all like one of the bawling and boastful trippers who sometimes come over to the islands for a night and pretend to know how to manage a boat. Yet---- 'What do you mean,' asked the girl, severely, 'by going out in a boat, when you ought to have known very well that you could not manage her?' 'We thought we could,' replied this disconcerted pretender, with meekness suitable to the occasion. Indeed, under such humiliating circumstances, Captain Parolles himself would become meek. 'If we had not seen you,' she continued, 'you would most certainly have been killed.' 'I begin to think we might. We should certainly have gone on those rocks. But there is an island close by. We could swim.' 'If your boat had touched those rocks you would have been dead in three minutes,' this maid of wisdom continued. 'Nothing could have saved you. No boat could have come near you. And to think of standing or swimming in that current and among those rocks! Oh! but you don't know Scilly.' 'No,' he replied, still with a meekness that disarmed wrath, 'I'm afraid not.' 'Tell me how it happened.' The other man struck in--he who was wielding the oar. He also was a young man, of shorter and more sturdy build than the other. Had he not, unfortunately, confined his whole attention in youth to football, he might have made a good boatman. Really, a young man whose appearance conveyed no information or suggestion at all about him except that he seemed healthy, active, and vigorous, and that he was presumably short-sighted, or he would not have worn spectacles. 'I will tell you how it came about,' he said. 'This man would go sketching the coast. I told him that the islands are so beautifully and benevolently built that every good bit has got another bit on the next island, or across a cove, or on the other side of a bay, put there on purpose for the finest view of the first bit. You only get that arrangement, you know, in the Isles of Scilly and the Isles of Greece. But he wouldn't be persuaded, and so we took a boat and went to sea, like the three merchants of Bristol city. We saw Jerusalem and Madagascar very well, and if you hadn't turned up in the nick of time I believe we should have seen the river Styx as well, with Cocytus very likely: good old Charon certainly: and Tantalus, too much punished--overdone--up to his neck.' Armorel heard, wondering what, in the name of goodness, this talker of strange language might mean.