Page:"The Mummy" Volume 3.djvu/227

 darling!" said the friar; "see, here is her name worked upon it by her own pretty fingers:" and as he turned to examine it, his foot slipped, and he rolled into the water, floundering about like a huge porpoise.

"Oh dear! oh dear!" cried Abelard, "he will certainly be drowned. Submersion in an aqueous fluid is almost always destructive of animal life, and I see little chance that he has of escape."

"Och! and will ye let me drown while ye're talking?" asked the indignant priest. "Before it's the good-natured thing ye'd be doing in pulling me out, will ye let me be suffocated?"

"No, no, certainly not!" returned Abelard; "my agony is unspeakable at your distress. I only doubt how I shall be able to raise you without a lever or pully. The application of the mechanical powers—"

"May go to the devil," cried Father Murphy, as he crawled out without assistance: "and so you would have let me drown, whilst you were talking of the mechanical powers?"

"Excuse me, father," returned Abelard; "friendship is a powerful affection of the human mind; it invigorates, it warms."