For about an hour I laboured at my picture with commendable industry. But somehow or other I did not make as rapid progress as such diligence deserved. A vision of a girl with bronze hair kept flitting before my eyes in the most elusive and disconcerting fashion. Once I actually found myself murmuring, "Lie down, sir!" apparently in an attempt to analyze the peculiar charm with which these three words seemed to be associated. For a person of well-regulated mind this was distinctly humiliating. I began to take myself to task. "Because a young woman happens to address a bulldog in your hearing," I inquired, "is that any reason why you should waste an entire morning?" Getting no reply, I continued with increasing sternness: "You are as bad as George. You are making an idiot of yourself over a red-haired slip of a girl whom you have only seen about three times in your life. Why, if it comes to that, you don't even know her name! Sir, I am disgusted with you." Relieved by this Johnsonian rebuke, I again turned to my picture, and for twenty minutes or so worked on with unruffled concentration. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was hungry. I moved aside my paints, carefully laid down the canvas in the end of the punt, and, pulling out the luncheon-basket from under the seat, began to prepare my frugal but well-earned meal. The tongue, my _chef-d'œuvre_, was encased in one of those ingenious tins which you open by twisting a key. I was deep in this fascinating process when my ears were assailed by the sudden splash of an approaching craft. I looked up with a frown. Such an intrusion on my privacy seemed to me to savour of gross impertinence. I had come to regard the Bourne as my private property, which I was magnanimous enough to open to the public cm Saturdays and Sundays. And here was some coarse-grained stranger thrusting his way in at one o'clock on Tuesday afternoon. "In future," I said to myself, "I shall mine the channel." Nearer and nearer came that offensive splash, varied by the occasional swish of a parted bush, and the creaking of an indifferently handled punt-pole. Assuming an expression of cold displeasure, I sat up and waited on Fate. At last the nose of a punt thrust itself round the bend, and a moment later the intruder emerged into full view. In my agitation I dropped the tongue in the butter. It was the bronze-haired girl from Otter's Holt! Then a series of incidents occurred with the bewildering rapidity of a cinematograph. Disturbed, apparently, by my unfortunate _lapsus linguæ_, the bulldog, which was crouching in the stern of the punt, leaped forward, barking his defiance. In his ardour he cannoned heavily against a basket reposing on the seat. There was a splash, a cry of despair from the bronze-haired maiden, and the aforesaid basket settled down peacefully at the bottom of the Bourne.