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“I don’t know, it’s biting me. Oh, it’s biting me all over my legs! Oh, what shall I do? Oh, it does hurt! Oh! oh! oh!” remarked Denny, among his screams, and he splashed towards the bank. Oswald went into the water and caught hold of him and helped him out. It is true that Oswald had his boots on, but I trust he would not have funked the unknown terrors of the deep, even without his boots. I am almost sure he would not have.

When Denny had scrambled and been hauled ashore, we saw with horror and amaze that his legs were stuck all over with large black slug-looking things. Denny turned green in the face–and even Oswald felt a bit queer, for he knew in a moment what the black dreadfulnesses were. He had read about them in a book called Magnet Stories, where there was a girl called Theodosia, and she could play brilliant trebles on the piano in duets, but the other girl knew all about leeches, which is much more useful and golden deedy. Oswald tried to pull the leeches off, but they wouldn’t, and Denny howled so he had to stop trying. He remembered from the Magnet Stories how to make the leeches begin biting–the girl did it with cream–but he could not remember how to stop them, and they had not wanted any showing how to begin.

“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh, it does hurt! Oh, oh!” Denny observed, and Oswald said:

“Be a man! Buck up! If you won’t let me take them off you’ll just have to walk home in them.”

At this thought the unfortunate youth’s tears fell fast. But Oswald gave him an arm, and carried his boots for him, and he consented to buck up, and the two struggled on towards the others, who were coming back, attracted by Denny’s yells. He did not stop howling for a moment, except to breathe. No one ought to blame him till they have had eleven leeches on their right leg and six on their left, making seventeen in all, as Dicky said, at once.

It was lucky he did yell, as it turned out, because a man on the road–where the telegraph wires were–was interested by his howls, and came across the marsh to us as hard as he could.

When he saw Denny’s legs he said:

“Blest if I didn’t think so,” and he picked Denny up and carried him under one arm, where Denny went on saying “Oh!” and “It does hurt” as hard as ever.

Our rescuer, who proved to be a fine big young man in the bloom of youth, and a farm-laborer by trade, in corduroys, carried the wretched sufferer to the cottage where he lived with his aged mother; and then Oswald found that what he had forgotten about the leeches was salt. The young man in the bloom of youth’s mother put salt on the leeches, and they squirmed off, and fell with sickening, slug-like flops on the brick floor.

Then the young man in corduroys and the bloom, etc., carried Denny home on his back, after his legs had been bandaged up, so that he looked like “wounded warriors returning.”

It was not far by the road, though such a long distance by the way the young explorers had come.

He was a good young man, and though, of course, acts of goodness are their own reward, still I was glad he had the two half-crowns Albert’s uncle gave him, as well as his own good act. But I am not sure Alice ought to have put him in the Golden Deed book which was supposed to be reserved for Us.

Perhaps you will think this was the end of the source of the Nile (or north pole). If you do, it only shows how mistaken the gentlest reader may be.