“I got on very comfortably that afternoon, never fouling any of the ships lying in the Pool, getting well under London Bridge, and old Blackfriars with its covered-in seats like small domes of St. Paul’s cut in half, and so on and under Westminster Bridge, which was very much like the one at Blackfriars, and on and on, till the tide was at its height, when I let go the anchors and went to look at them two chaps; when, instead of being all fight, I found as the money as ought to have bought herrins and taties had gone in a bottle of stuff which one of ’em had smuggled in under his jacket, and they was wuss than ever.
“Of course I was precious wild; but as it’s waste o’ words to talk to men in that state, I saved it up for them, went forward, and rolled myself up in my jacket, pulled a bit o’ tarpaulin over me, wished for a pipe, and then began to think.
“Now, I suppose that I got thinking too hard, as I sat there looking at the lights, blinking here and there ashore, as the tide ran hissing down by the sides of the barge; for after a time I got too tired to think, and I must have gone off fast asleep, for I got dreaming of all sorts of horrible things through being in an uncomfortable position, and among others—I suppose all on account of twenty ton of gunpowder I had on board—I dreamed as it had blown up, and I was in our little boat, rowing about on the river amongst burnt wood and bits of barge and powder barrels, picking up the pieces of myself.
“Yes, rowing about and picking up the pieces of myself; because, I said to myself, I ought to be buried decently, and not be left to go floating about up and down with the tide. I had a hard job, I remember—now fishing up a foot, now a leg, and now pieces of my body. How it was I never seemed to ask myself, that I could be rowing about and fishing myself up; but there it was, and I got quite cross at last because my head gave me so much trouble: for every time I reached at it with one of the oars it bobbed under water, and came up again, and rolled over and over, and seemed to laugh at and wink at me, till, in a passion, I gave it a heavy tap with the oar, and it went under again, and came up on the other side of the boat, bobbing up and down like a big apple.
“‘Now what’s the good of making a fool of yourself?’ I says. ‘Why don’t you come in the boat along with the rest of the pieces?’
“Then it opened its mouth, and says out loud—
“‘I’m as thirsty as a fish.’
“Now, the idea of that head of mine being thirsty, when it was swallowing water out there in the river, so tickled me that I began to laugh, and that laughing woke me, all of a cold shiver, to find it very dark, and these words seeming still to be buzzing in my ears—
“‘I’m as thirsty as a fish.’