"I've dropped my hat
over-board."
Then: "Hi! Tom - Dick! can't you hear?" not quite so affably this time.
Then: "Hi! Confound YOU, you dunder-headed idiots! Hi! stop! Oh you -
!"
After that he springs up, and dances about, and roars himself red in the
face, and curses everything he knows. And the small boys on the bank
stop and jeer at him, and pitch stones at him as he is pulled along past
them, at the rate of four miles an hour, and can't get out.
Much of this sort of trouble would be saved if those who are towing would
keep remembering that they are towing, and give a pretty frequent look
round to see how their man is getting on. It is best to let one person
tow. When two are doing it, they get chattering, and forget, and the
boat itself, offering, as it does, but little resistance, is of no real
service in reminding them of the fact.
As an example of how utterly oblivious a pair of towers can be to their
work, George told us, later on in the evening, when we were discussing
the subject after supper, of a very curious instance.
He and three other men, so he said, were sculling a very heavily laden
boat up from Maidenhead one evening, and a little above Cookham lock they
noticed a fellow and a girl, walking along the towpath, both deep in an
apparently interesting and absorbing conversation. They were carrying a
boat-hook between them, and, attached to the boat-hook was a tow-line,
which trailed behind them, its end in the water. No boat was near, no
boat was in sight. There must have been a boat attached to that tow-line
at some time or other, that was certain; but what had become of it, what
ghastly fate had overtaken it, and those who had been left in it, was
buried in mystery. Whatever the accident may have been, however, it had
in no way disturbed the young lady and gentleman, who were towing. They
had the boat-hook and they had the line, and that seemed to be all that
they thought necessary to their work.
George was about to call out and wake them up, but, at that moment, a
bright idea flashed across him, and he didn't. He got the hitcher
instead, and reached over, and drew in the end of the tow-line; and they
made a loop in it, and put it over their mast, and then they tidied up
the sculls, and went and sat down in the stern, and lit their pipes.
And that young man and young woman towed those four hulking chaps and a
heavy boat up to Marlow.
George said he never saw so much thoughtful sadness concentrated into one
glance before, as when, at the lock, that young couple grasped the idea
that, for the last two miles, they had been towing the wrong boat.
