The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe. The rain continued to lash down with what you might call indescribable fury, and I was sorry that in the agitation inseparable from shinning up a stone wall at practically a second’s notice I had dropped the raincoat which I had been bringing with me for my fellow-rooster. For a moment I thought of offering him mine, but wiser counsels prevailed.
“How near did it come to getting you?” I asked.
“Within an ace,” replied my companion, gazing down with a look of marked dislike. “I had to make a very rapid spring.”
The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!” and the picture he conjured up, if you know what I mean, was rather pleasing.
“It is no laughing matter,” he said, shifting the look of dislike to me.
“Sorry.”
“I might have been seriously injured.”
“Would you consider bunging another brick at the bird?”
“Do nothing of the sort. It will only annoy him.”
“Well, why not annoy him? He hasn’t shown such a dashed lot of consideration for our feelings.”
The Right Hon. now turned to another aspect of the matter.
“I cannot understand how my boat, which I fastened securely to the stump of a willow-tree, can have drifted away.”
“Dashed mysterious.”