I seemed to have dropped back into the boy again, and half wondered that I was not tired and footsore, and longing for a ride on one of the bony horses. And so it was all through our journey down. Every lock seemed familiar, and at more than one lock-house there were the same green apples and cakes and glasses of sticky sweets, side by side with two or three string-tied bottles of ginger-beer. Two or three times over I found myself getting low-spirited as I dwelt upon my journey up, and thought of what a poor, miserable little fellow I was; but Tom was always in the highest of spirits, and they proved at last to be infectious. We had pretty well reached the spot at last where I had first struck the river, when we stopped to see a canal-boat pass through the lock, the one where I had stared with wonder to see the great boat sink down some eight or nine feet to a lower level. The boat, which was a very showily painted one, evidently quite new, was deeply laden, and in one place a part of a glistening black tarpaulin trailed in the water. As the boat's progress was checked, and the lock-keeper came out, the short, thick-set man who had been at the tiller shouted something, and a round-faced girl of about twenty, with a bright-coloured cotton handkerchief pinned over her shoulders, came up the hatch, and took the man's place, while he douched forward to alter the tarpaulin where it trailed. He was quite a young man, and I noticed that his hair was fair, short, and crisp about his full neck, as he bent down, pipe in mouth, while a something in the way in which he shouted to the boy in charge of the horses settled my doubts. "Jack!" I shouted. He rose up very slowly, took the pipe out of his mouth, and spat in the water; then, gradually turning himself in my direction, he stared hard at me and said: "Hello!" "Don't you know me again, Jack?" He stared hard at me for some moments, took his pipe out of his mouth again, spat once more in the water, said surlily, "No!" and bent down slowly to his work. "Don't you remember my going up to London with you nine years ago this summer?" He assumed the perpendicular at once, stared, scowled, took his pipe out of his mouth with his left hand, and then, as a great smile gradually dawned all over his brown face, he gave one leg a smart slap with a great palm, and seemed to shake himself from his shoulders to his heels, which I found was his way of having a hearty laugh. "Why, so it is!" he cried, in a sort of good-humoured growl. "Missus, lash that there tiller and come ashore. Here's that there young chap." To Tom's great amusement, Jack came ashore at the lock, and was followed by his round-faced partner, for whom he showed his affection by giving her a tremendous slap on the shoulder, to which she responded by driving her elbow into his side, and saying, "Adone, Jack. Don't be a fool!" and ending by staring at us hard. "I didn't know yer agen," growled Jack. "Lor' ain't you growed!"