"I can't swim a stroke," I said. * * * * * We got ashore--or nearly so, at least; and that I in no way assisted to accelerate the journey will be plain, as the phrase goes, to the meanest intelligence. But sit down in cold blood--if not, fortunately as I was then, in wet clothes--to describe that elysian passing, I may not. Spirit readers of mine--if spirit readers of mortal book there be--who have been borne on angel pinions to heaven, may be able to enter into my feelings at being thus wafted through magic waters by an angel hand. Gross mortals of flesh and blood may not. But spirit readers have this advantage over me--that whereas they, at the end of their journey, saw the gates of Heaven open, I, at the end of mine, saw the gates of Paradise too rudely closed. When we were some ten yards from the shore, and while I was rehearsing to myself the touching scene of our landing--I falling on my knees before her, and, in a voice which I intended doing my best to make appear broken with emotion, calling the heavens to witness that but for her I should now be weltering in my grave (I was not exactly sure what "weltering" meant, but it sounded wet and weedy and watery, and, as Milton had used the word in a similar sense, it could not be far wrong)--she, her beautiful eyes suffused with tears, one or two of which, I arranged, should drop upon my upturned worshipping face, would then bend over me and, laying a hand tenderly on my head, would sob, "My poor fellow! Do not give way. You are safe. The danger is past!"--while I was rehearsing this pretty and touching picture, she suddenly stopped. Thus far she had been swimming, and swimming strongly on her breast, striking out with her left arm and supporting my head with her right. Now, as I say, she stopped, and I feared that she was becoming exhausted. "Put down your feet," she said, "and see if you can feel the ground." I did so, and found that we were in water sufficiently shallow to allow me to stand upright with my chin well above the surface. "Yes," I said, "we're safe. My feet are on the ground. How can I ever thank you? How can----" "Then wade the rest of the way," she cut me short, cruelly. "Don't trespass any more! Don't take boats that don't belong to you, and don't get out of your depth again until you have learned to swim." The next instant she had dived under and was gone, the flick of her tiny heels, as they came together when she threw them up, seeming like the snap of a derisive finger in my face.