animals it don't come to by nature. And that's a scandal however you look at it." So strip I did, and was girt with the belt under my armpits, tied to a rope, and slipped over the side in fear and trembling. I swallowed a pint or two of salt water and wept (but they could not see this, though they watched me curiously), I dare say, half a pint of it back in tears of fright. I knew by observation how legs and arms should be worked, but made disheartening efforts to put it into practice. At length, utterly ashamed, I was hauled out and congratulated: at which I stared. "As for the swimmin'," said Isaac, "I can't call to mind that I've seen worse: but for pluck, considering the number of sharks at about this season, I couldn't ask better of his age." I had not thought of sharks—supposed them, indeed, to inhabit the tropics only. We caught one towards sunset, after it had fouled all our lines, and smashed its head with the unshipped tiller as it came to the surface. It measured five feet and a little over, and we lashed it alongside the gunwale and carried it home in triumph next morning (having shot the nets at sundown and slept and hauled them up empty at sunrise—the pilchards being scarce as yet, though a few had been caught off the Eddystone). I don't suppose the shark would have interfered with my bath, but I gave myself airs on the strength of him. CHAPTER IV. MISS PLINLIMMON. Late in August, and a week or two before Mr. Trapp changed his signboard and resumed his proper business, I was idling by the edge of the Barbican one evening when a boy, whose eye I had blacked recently, charged up behind me and pushed me over. I pretended to be drowning, and sank theatrically as he and half a dozen others, conveniently naked, plunged to the rescue. They dived for my body with great zeal, while I, having slipped under the keel of a trading-ketch and climbed on board by her accommodation-ladder dangling on the far side, watched them from behind a stack of flower-pots on her deck. When they desisted, and I
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