They might make a song about us, and sing it on winter nights as they pass round the wassail bowl in front of the cabin fire.' Noel wanted to very much; but I don't think it was altogether for generousness, but because he wanted to see how the sluices opened.

Yet perhaps I do but wrong the boy.
We sat and looked at the barge a bit longer, and then Oswald said, well, he didn't mind going back to the lock and having a look at the crowbars.
You see Oswald did not propose this; he did not even care very much about it when Alice suggested it.
But when we got to Stoneham Lock, and Dicky dragged the two heavy crowbars from among the elder bushes behind a fallen tree, and began to pound away at the sluice of the lock, Oswald felt it would not be manly to stand idly apart.

So he took his turn.
It was very hard work but we opened the lock sluices, and we did not drop the crowbar into the lock either, as I have heard of being done by older and sillier people.
The water poured through the sluices all green and solid, as if it had been cut with a knife, and where it fell on the water underneath the white foam spread like a moving counterpane.

When we had finished the lock we did the weir--which is wheels and chains--and the water pours through over the stones in a magnificent waterfall and sweeps out all round the weir-pool.
The sight of the foaming waterfalls was quite enough reward for our heavy labours, even without the thought of the unspeakable gratitude that the bargees would feel to us when they got back to their barge and found her no longer a stick-in-the-mud, but bounding on the free bosom of the river.
When we had opened all the sluices we gazed awhile on the beauties of Nature, and then went home, because we thought it would be more truly noble and good not to wait to be thanked for our kind and devoted action--and besides, it was nearly dinner-time and Oswald thought it was going to rain.
On the way home we agreed not to tell the others, because it would be like boasting of our good acts.
'They will know all about it,' Noel said, 'when they hear us being blessed by the grateful bargees, and the tale of the Unknown Helpers is being told by every village fireside.

And then they can write it in the Golden Deed book.' So we went home.