Miss Julia, taking down a shutter to reinstate The Pigeons as a tavern open to customers, noted that the faces of these two were strange to her. Also that they passed her with the barest good-morning, forbiddingly. The police generally cultivate intercourse with public-house keepers of every sort, but when one happens to be a lady with ringlets especially so; even should her complexion be partly due to correctives, to amalgamate a blotchiness. These officers overdid their indifference, and it attracted Miss Julia's attention. Aunt Elizabeth Jane thought at the time she might have mistaken what she heard one of them say to the other. For, of course, she passed them close. The words she heard seemed to be:--"That will be Hawkins." Something in them rang false with her concept of the situation. But there was the cherry-tart to be seen to, and some peas to boil. Only not the whole lot at once for only her and Michael! As for that boy, she had sent him off to the baker's, the minute he came back, to wait till the bit of the best end of the neck was sure to be quite done, and bring it away directly minute. * * * * * That day there was an unusually high spring-tide on the river, and presumably elsewhere; only that did not concern Hammersmith, which ascribed the tides to local impulses inherent in the Thames. Just after midday the water was all but up to the necks of the piers of Hammersmith Bridge, and the island at Chiswick was nearly submerged. Willows standing in lakes were recording the existence of towing-paths no longer able to speak for themselves, and the insolent plash of ripples over wharves that had always thought themselves above that sort of thing seemed to say:--"Thus far will I come, and a little farther for that matter." Father Thames never quite touched the landing of the boat-ladder, at the end of the garden at The Pigeons, but he went within six inches of it. "The water wasn't like you see it now, that day," said a man in the stern of a boat that was hanging about off the garden. "All of five foot lower down, I should figure it. _He_ didn't want no help to get up--not he!" "It was a tidy jump up, any way you put it," said the stroke oar.