I cannot read 'Three Men In A Boat' in public. I've C&P this, as you can see, the author isn't exactly brief.
We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us.
He looked at the picture on the tin ; we thought
of the juice. We smiled at one another, and
Harris got a spoon ready.
Then we looked for the knife to open the tin
with. We turned out everything in the hamper.
We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards
at the bottom of the boat. We took everything
out on to the bank and shook it. There was no
tin-opener to be found.
Then Harris tried to open the tin with a
pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself
badly ; and George tried a pair of scissors, and
the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out.
While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to
make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of
the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me
out between the boat and the bank into two feet
of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, unin-
jured, and broke a teacup.
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on
the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got
a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat
and brought out the mast, and George held the
tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone
against the top of it, and I took the mast and
poised it high in the air, and gathered up all my
strength and brought it down.
It was George's straw hat that saved his life
that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of
it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are
lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the
dangers they have passed through, George brings
it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale
is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.
After that, I took the tin off myself, and ham-
mered at it with the mast till I was worn out and
sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it out flat ; we beat it back square ; we
battered it into every form known to geometry
but we could not make a hole in it. Then George
went at it, and knocked it into a
shape so strange, so weird, so un-
earthly in its wild hideousness, that
he got frightened and threw away
the mast. Then we all three sat
round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across
the top that had the appearance of
a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that
Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and
flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it
sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into
the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never
paused till we reached Maidenhead.