The dinner was rather inconveniently despatched, in order to suit the convenience of the engaged performers, and by seven o'clock my new friend and myself were left to commence our voyage up the river. His spirits appeared even higher than they had been before, and I felt myself, when consigned to his care, something in the same situation as Mr. O'Rourke on the eagle's back: whither I was to be carried by his influence, or how to be dashed down when he got tired of me I could not clearly comprehend; nor were my apprehension of consequences in any satisfactory degree diminished when my perilous companion commenced a violent wordy attack upon a very respectable round-bodied gentleman who was sitting squeezed into the stern-sheets of a skiff, floating most agreeably to himself adown the stream, the gentle south-west breeze giving the sail of his boat a shape very similar to that of his equally well-filled white dimity waistcoat.
"Hollo!" cried my friend Daly; "I say, you sir, what are you doing in that boat?"
The suburban Josh maintained a dignified silence.
"I say, you sir," continued the undaunted joker, "what are you doing there? you have no business in that boat, and you know it!"
A slight yaw of the skiff into the wind's eye was the only proof of the stout navigator's agitation.
Still Daly was inexorable, and he again called to the unhappy mariner to get out of the boat. "I tell you, my fat friend," cried he, "you have no business in that boat!"
Flesh and blood could not endure this reiterated declaration. The ire of the Cockney was roused. "No business in this boat, sir!" cried he, "what d'ye mean?"
"I mean what I say," said Daly; "you have no business in it, and I'll prove it."
"I think, sir, you will prove no such thing," said the navigator, whose progress through the water was none of the quickest; "perhaps you don't know, sir, that this is my own pleasure-boat?"