There was a scream; a splash in the water. Tabitha, taking clothes from a line in the back-yard, cried out, “What is that?” Parson Brookes’s startled pigeons flew from their dove-cote, and wheeling round in widening circles cooed affrightedly. The white-faced boys stood aghast. Unless his fall had been seen from the opposite croft, their victim would be drowned before any aid they could bring was available; a wide circuit must be taken before a bridge could be reached! Buildings blocked up that side of the river. They looked at each other and spoke in whispers; then, with an animal instinct of self-preservation, sneaked off in silence and terror, leaving him to his fate. Not all. Kit Townley, who held the parcel, had drawn near to remonstrate. With a shriek he threw down the paper, and, hardly conscious what he did, tore wildly through the gates, and across the College Yard, to startle the first he met with the alarm that a College boy was drowning in the Irk! CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH. SIMON’S PUPIL. It was fortunate for Jabez that the late rains had raised the level of the Irk: otherwise, that being the shallowest part of the stream, there would not have been sufficient depth of water to buoy him up when he was pitched over the wall; and had his head come in contact with rock or stone, falling from such an elevation, his history would have closed with the last chapter. It was doubly fortunate that sensible Simon had taught him that without which no boy’s education—nor, indeed, any girl’s either—is complete, and that Jabez, from very love of the water, had kept himself in practice whenever a holiday had given him opportunity. He had gone over the wall backwards, falling into the stream head downwards, but not altogether unprepared; and to him head first, heels first, forward or backward, were all as one. Like a cork he rose, and struck out across the river. The slimy stone embankment seemed to slip from his touch; there was no hold for his hand; it was too steep and smooth to climb; and he felt that the river, swift in its fulness, was bent on bearing him to the Irwell, so dangerously near. He raised his voice for “help.” Tabitha, listening, answered with a scream and a shout, and, bolting into the house, disturbed the Parson and his besotted father at their tea by the outcry she made, as she rushed on into the street with the alarm of “a lad dreawndin,” just as the conscious culprits slunk past to their own quarters. Doctor Stone, the first recipient of terrified Kit Townley’s incoherent intelligence, was simultaneously racing at full speed, with a troop of College boys at his heels, down towards Hunt’s Bank and the outlet of the Irk, with the swift consciousness that the only hope of saving life was in the chance of reaching the confluence of the rivers first. He thought the dusk never came down so rapidly. A lamplighter, with ladder and flaring long-spouted oil-can light, was going his rounds.