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Updated: May 20, 2025
"He looked white and hurt in his pride, and said: 'You're right; and I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore. "'I don't want your pardon, I said, 'and I won't sit down in your house, and we won't discuss what has happened but what is to be. For there's a great wrong you've done, and I've a right to say what you shall do now, Paul Bargee. "He looked at me and said slowly: 'What is that?
But old boatmen still love to relate to their peaceable and admiring pupils how that pocket Hercules, the Honourable S C , now a pious clergyman, had a single combat with a saucy six foot bargee, "all alone by they two selves," bunged up both his eyes, and left him all but dead to time, ignorant then, and for months after, of the name of his victor.
Further on they met a barge coming up the river, and the Boy wished the man who was steering a polite good-night, and hoped he'd have a pleasant passage and no bad weather; to which piece of facetiousness the bargee replied good-humouredly, having mistaken the boy's contralto for a woman's voice, an error of judgment at which the latter affected to rage, much to the amusement of the Tenor.
'I was at the Brocas, and a bargee told me that an Eton fellow had been drowned above Surley, and the only Eton boat above Surley to-day, as I can learn, is Buckhurst's four-oar. That is all. There was a murmur of hope. 'Oh! come, come, said Sedgwick, 'there is come chance. Who is with Buckhurst; who knows? 'I saw him walk down to the Brocas with Vere, said a boy.
"Well," said the Bargee, more gently, "cut along, then, and don't you do it again, that's all." The children hurried up the bank. "Chuck us a coat, M'ria," shouted the man. And a red-haired woman in a green plaid shawl came out from the cabin door with a baby in her arms and threw a coat to him. He put it on, climbed the bank, and slouched along across the bridge towards the village.
"The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating home, 'travelling abed, it is merely as if he were listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a picture book in which he had no concern.
So the river life flows by; skiffs, and four oars, canoes, solitary scullers in outriggers, once now and then a swift eight, launches, a bargee in a tublike dingey standing up and pushing his sculls instead of pulling; gentlemen, with their shoulders in a halter, hauling like horses and towing fair freights against the current; and punts poled across to shady nooks.
I did not stay there long, but whilst I was kept there, by the strain on the family exchequer, I was very unhappy. It was in the midst of a sore-hearted loneliness that I encountered Gavin, who, to the best of my belief, was the son of a bargee who worked on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.
"One afternoon Ed Nichols, who was catching me then, came up with a serious face and said: 'Where's your lady to-day, Larry and Paul Bargee? And by the way he said it I knew what he had in mind, and good friend that he was of mine I liked to have throttled him. They told me to pitch the game, and I did. I won it too.
There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real secret of pleasant society. The Bargee Bill, whom the children had found so disagreeable, was considered excellent company by his mates.
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