to me to lack something. He has
just soused a dog, and now he's busy watering a sign-post. I am going to
wait till he has finished."

"Nonsense," said Harris; "he won't wet you."

"That is precisely what I am going to make sure of," answered George,
saying which he jumped off, and, taking up a position behind a remarkably
fine elm, pulled out and commenced filling his pipe.

I did not care to take the tandem on by myself, so I stepped off and
joined him, leaving the machine against a tree. Harris shouted something
or other about our being a disgrace to the land that gave us birth, and
rode on.

The next moment I heard a woman's cry of distress. Glancing round the
stem of the tree, I perceived that it proceeded from the young and
elegant lady before mentioned, whom, in our interest concerning the road-
waterer, we had forgotten. She was riding her machine steadily and
straightly through a drenching shower of water from the hose. She
appeared to be too paralysed either to get off or turn her wheel aside.
Every instant she was becoming wetter, while the man with the hose, who
was either drunk or blind, continued to pour water upon her with utter
indifference. A dozen voices yelled imprecations upon him, but he took
no heed whatever.

Harris, his fatherly nature stirred to its depths, did at this point
what, under the circumstances, was quite the right and proper thing to
do. Had he acted throughout with the same coolness and judgment he then
displayed, he would have emerged from that incident the hero of the hour,
instead of, as happened, riding away followed by insult and threat.
Without a moment's hesitation he spurted at the man, sprang to the
ground, and, seizing the hose by the nozzle, attempted to wrest it away.

What he ought to have done, what any man retaining his common sense would
have done the moment he got his hands upon the thing, was to turn off the
tap. Then he might have played foot-ball with the man, or battledore and
shuttlecock as he pleased; and the twenty or thirty people who had rushed
forward to assist would have only applauded. His idea, however, as he
explained to us afterwards, was to take away the hose from the man, and,
for punishment, turn it upon the fool himself. The waterman's idea
appeared to be the same, namely, to retain the hose as a weapon with
which to soak Harris. Of course, the result was that, between them, they
soused every dead and living thing within fifty yar