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 had seen the culprit first treated as a leper by the crowd, then haled before two constables and examined at length, finally led homeward by the ear and cuffed at every few steps by his mother (a widow), I slipped back into the water, dived back under the ketch, and, emerging, asked the cause of the disturbance.

This made a new reputation for me, at the expense of some emotion to Mrs.Trapp, to whom the news of my decease had been borne on the swiftest wings of rumour.
But I have tarried too long over those days of my apprenticeship, and am yet only at the beginning.