The river in parts had overflowed its banks, and the towing-path for some yards together was often under water. But Mr. Plantagenet, never pausing, walked, slipped, and staggered through the slush and mud, very treacherous under foot, knowing nothing, heeding nothing, save that the coolness about his ankles seemed to revive him a little and to sober his head as he went floundering through it. By-and-by he reached the Long Bridges--a range of frail planks with wooden side-rails, that lead the tow-path across two or three broad stretches of back-water from the Isis. He straggled across somehow, looking down every now and then into the swirling water, where the stars were just reflected in quick flashing eddies, while all the rest about looked black as night, but, oh! so cool and inviting to his fevered forehead. So he wandered on, fiercely remorseful within, burning hot without, till he came abreast of a row of old pollard-willows, close beside the edge of the little offshoot at Iffley lasher. The bank was damp, but he sat down upon it all the same, and grew half drowsy as he sat with the mingled effects of wine and indignation. After awhile he rose, and stumbled on across a bend of the meadows till he reached the river. Just there the bank was very slippery and treacherous. Even a sober man could hardly have kept his footing on it in so dark a night. 'One false step,' Edmund Plantagenet thought to himself with wild despair, 'and there would be an end of all this fooling. One false step--and splash! A man may slip any day. No suicide in tumbling into a swollen river of a moonless night when the bank's all flooded.' Still, on and on he walked, having staggered now far, far below Iffley, and away towards the neighbourhood of Sandford lasher. Slippery bank all the distance, and head growing dizzier and dizzier each moment with cold and wet, as well as wine and anger. At last, of a sudden, a dull splash in the river! Bargemen, come up late in the evening from Abingdon, and laid by now for the night under shelter of the willows on the opposite side two hundred yards down, heard the noise distinctly. Smoking their pipes on deck very late, it being a fine evening, one says to the other: 'Sounds precious like a man, Bill!' Bill, philosophically taking a long pull, answers calmly at the end: 'More liker a cow, Tom. None of _our_ business, anyhow. Get five bob, mayhap, for bringin' in the body. Hook it up easy enough to-morrow mornin? Next morning, sure enough, a body might be seen entangled among the reeds under the steep mud-bank on the Berkshire shore. Bill, taking it in tow and bringing it up to Oxford, got five shillings from the county for his lucky discovery. At the inquest, thought it wise, however, to omit mentioning the splash heard on deck overnight, or that queer little episode of philosophical conversation.