Charley told her all about himself,
about his home, his dear mamma and Judith, his papa's ill-health, and
hopes of restoration, his college schoolboy life. It was delicious to
lie there in the languor of returning health, and talk of these things.
The kindly woman won his love and confidence; but when she asked him
how he came to fall into the river, he could never remember. In the
social atmosphere of companionship, in the bright sunlight, Charley
could look back on the "ghost" in the cloisters, and draw his own
deductions. His good sense told him it was no ghost; that it was all a
trick of Bywater's and others of the college boys. The woman's opinion
was, that if they did do such a thing to frighten him, they ought to be
whipped; but she was inclined to view it as a delusion of Charley's
imagination, a relic left by the fever.
"Your folks'll be fine and pleased to see you again, dear," she would
say to him. "My master'll moor the barge to the side when we gets to
the place, and I'll take ye home to 'um."
How Charley longed for it, he alone could tell; pleasant as it was, now
he was better, to lie on deck, on a rude bed made of sacks, and glide
peacefully along on the calm river, between the green banks, the blue
sky above, the warm sun shining on him. Had Charley been placed on that
barge in health, he would have thought it the nastiest place he had
ever seen--confined, dirty, monotonous.
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