Thrale, handling the little brass wheel forward, was conscious of uneasiness. The launch steered after a fashion, but he had little control of her. The trees on the banks appeared to be flying upstream at the pace of an express train, and ahead of him was the town bridge. He decided instantly that they could not pass under it, and put the wheel over, intending to shoot out of the stream into the calm of the flood water over the new open bank. But as the launch turned and came across, the current took her stern and turned her half round. For a moment her lee rail was under water, and she trembled and rocked on the verge of capsize. Then her engines drove her out of the stream and she righted herself again and began to cut through the almost still, shallow flood water. "Stop her!" roared Thrale. "I say, what's up?" replied Eileen, coolly, as she obeyed the order. "No room to pass under the bridge," said Thrale. "I suppose we'll have to navigate, as you call it. Go dead slow, and be prepared to stop her at a moment's notice." They spent over an hour in finding a passage round the approach to the bridge. They had laboriously to pole the launch through the tops of hedges, and in one place they were aground for ten minutes. But after they had returned to the stream once more they had a rapid and easy passage down to Bray. They shot the great arch of the Maidenhead railway bridge triumphantly. Eileen said it was "glorious." The weir at Bray proved even more difficult to negotiate than the one above, and by the time it was fully opened the dull December afternoon was closing in. They spent that night moored to two of the elms that ring the isolated little church in the meadows by Boveney. "At this rate," remarked Thrale as they settled themselves for the night, "it'll take us a week to get to Richmond. We've done two weirs out of thirteen, so far." 3 Thrale's estimate proved excessive. They reached Richmond on the fourth day out from Marlow, having opened another nine weirs--the one at Old Windsor had been swept away, and the one below Richmond Bridge Thrale opened that afternoon. During those four days they had seen few signs of life. They had moved, keeping to the main stream for the most part, in the midst of a wide expanse of water; exploring a desolate and wasted country. Once they had been hailed by three women, who looked out at them from a house in Windsor, and shouted something they did not catch; and a woman had been standing on Staines Bridge as they careered intrepidly through the centre arch--they had no time even to distinguish her dress. But with these exceptions they might have come through the land of an extinct civilization, devoid of life; a land in which deserted houses and church towers stood up from the silver sheet of a vast lake, that was threaded by this one impetuous torrent of swelling river.