Three Men in a Boat Boat" is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog". The trip is
The Three Little Men in the Wood his sword over her three times. The boy tells the king, who does so, and the duck turns back into the queen, who comes back to life. The king hides his wife during his child's baptism to confront the step-mother and false queen. He asks the step-mother what the punishment should be for someone who drags another from bed and drowns them: the woman foolishly answers that they should be placed in a cask with nails inside and rolled down a hill into the water. The king then exclaims she has just spoken her own sentence, so the step-mother and