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There was just the faintest splash of water from the spot where the stream and the river met, the distant barking of a dog, the occasional croaking of a frog from somewhere in the midst of the bed of lilies. Otherwise the silence and the darkness were like a shroud. Francis leaned forward in his place. His hands, which gripped the sides of the punt, were hot. The serenity of the night mocked him.
"We uns don't bleeve in't, and so we runned away, and left Captain Sullendine to paddle his own punt. They get off at three in the morn in'." Bird Riley took another drink, and then he toppled over.
The undertaking was, however, more difficult than he had expected, and at last he had to abandon his design, and, instead, to try and enlarge the little punt, or the coracle rather, which he had constructed some time before. The two carpenters laboured away every day, when not engaged in shooting or fishing, or otherwise providing for their support.
His first act when he was sufficiently recovered to move about once more was to secure the phial containing the liquid which had done all the mischief, and with Nicholls to manage the punt go right out to sea, where, hastily uncorking the bottle, he flung it as far from him to leeward as possible, at the same moment ordering his companion to give way for home again with all speed.
Perhaps he was rather old for his work, but he was so extraordinarily peaceful that you could not help liking him, and I had a vague feeling that he was my grandfather. The change from Mr. Edwardes to him was like going to bed in a choppy sea and waking up in a punt on the Cherwell.
If we could follow them perfectly, nothing would be hidden from us. But is not our knowledge of them still incomplete? Are there not many stars still beyond our horizon lights that are known only to the dwellers in the far south-land, among the spice-trees of Punt and the gold mines of Ophir?" There was a murmur of assent among the listeners.
They were soon fishing beside him, Chamilly at one end of the skiff intent upon his sport. The old man's flat punt was littered with perch. How early he must have risen! He was small of figure, weathered of face, simple and impassive of manner. "Good day," Chrysler opened; "the weather is wettish." "It is morningy, Monsieur." "My son knows you, Monsieur," he said again humbly, after a pause.
"Now then!" cries our coxswain. Ah! At a tremendous pace our boat flew forward over the very place where, a second before, our duck had been. But where was he? By a turn of the hand he had twisted round his punt, and as our fellows dug their oars wildly into the water and tried to pull up, there was he, calmly scuttling away in an opposite direction, and laughing at us!
The chain holding the punt to the jetty could easily be slipped from its ring; there was not, could not be, any danger in paddling peacefully along a quiet little backwater. Of course, prudent people would say Aunt Maria would say But then if you waited until all the prudent people on earth approved of all that you did, you might sit with your hands crossed in your lap for the rest of your life!
They always take place in the open, while I am floating among pond-lilies or drifting under wide-spreading trees, their drooping leaves dabbling in the silent current like children's fingers, or while I am sitting under skies as blue as any that bend above my Beloved City by the Sea; often, too, when the delicious silence about me is broken only by the lapping of the water around my punt, the sharpening of a bit of charcoal, or the splash of a fish.
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