Youth, then, at the prow and pleasure at the helm—and the flesh was so glossy under the noonday sun, the colours so blazingly bright, that I was really reminded of Etty’s little ravishment—the laden boat passed slowly within a few yards of me. Stretched like a live cross on my mattress of brine I looked at them languidly through half-closed eyes. They looked at me; a blank incuriosity was on their faces—for a glimpse only, then they averted their eyes as though I had been one of those exhausted frogs one sees, after the breeding season, floating belly upwards on the surface of a pond. And yet I was what is technically known as an immortal soul. It struck me that it would have been more reasonable if they had stopped their boat and hailed me across the water. “Good morning, stranger. How goes your soul? And what shall we do to be saved?” But on the other hand, our habit of regarding strangers as being nothing more to us than exhausted frogs probably saves a good deal of trouble. “From cape to cape,” emended the red-faced gentleman, as they receded from me. And very diffidently, in a soft shy voice, the solicitous young creature suggested that the something sea was a torrent sea. “Whatever vat may be,” said the young rower, whose exertions under the broiling sun entitled him to take the professionally nautical, commonsense view about the matter. “But it’s obvious what it is,” said the Chinese lantern lady, rather contemptuously. The young man at the stern threw away his cigarette and started meditatively whistling the tune of “_Deh, vieni alla finestra_” from _Don Giovanni_. There was a silence; the boat receded, stroke after stroke. The last words I heard were uttered, drawlingly and in a rather childish voice, by the young woman in the stern. “I wish I could get brown more quickly,” she said, lifting one foot out of the water and looking at the white bare leg. “One might have been living in a cellar. Such a dreadfully unwholesome look of blanched asparagus. Or even mushrooms,” she added pensively.