Chapter - 5, Three Men in a Boat Summary Class 9 Three Men in a Boat

George fails in his duty
The narrator was woken up by his housekeeper, Mrs Poppets, at nine o’clock in the morning. He woke Harris up and both began to accuse each other for not waking each other up. Soon they realised that George who took the responsibility of waking them up at 6.30 in the morning was still asleep. He was snoring. They were angry with him and rushed to him. Harris landed him one with a slipper and Jim shouted in his ear. George woke up. “Get up, you fat-headed chunk!” said Harris, “It’s quarter to ten” . He got up and fell into the bath-tub.

Weather -Forecasts
Montmorency had invited two other dogs and they were whiling away their time by fighting with each other on the doorstep. They calmed them with an umbrella and sat down to take their breakfast. George got hold of the paper and read the ‘weather— forecast’ to them. The writer thought that the ‘weather4orecast’ was a fraud. It was generally wrong. He remembered a lovely day that was ruined by the forecast “Heavy showers with thunderstorms may be expected”. They didn’t go out that day. But it did not rain at all. The next morning they read that it was going to be a warm and ‘fair’ day, but they returned home drenched. The barometer was useless.

Getting ready
The friends carted out their luggage on to the doorstep and waited for a cab. They  seemed to have a good deal of luggage. No cab came by, but the street boys stopped there to look at the luggage. Biggs’ boy was the first to arrive. Biggs, their green grocer, secured the services of the most unprincipled errand-boys that civilization had ever produced. He came to a dead stop in front of their luggage. And then another boy stopped there. Then the young gentleman from the boot-shop stopped there. Soon a small crowd collected there. One party thought that it was a wedding and pointed out Harris as the bridegroom, while the party of elders thought that it was a funeral, and the writer was probably the corpse’s brother. Finally, a cab turned up and they went to the Waterloo station. Nobody knew at Waterloo where the eleven-five train to Kingston started from.

Train journey to Kingston
They gave bribe to the engine driver and begged him to reach Kingston by 11. .5. Thus they reached Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway. They learnt, afterwards, that the train they had come by was really the Exeter Mail and they had spent hours looking for it.

The boat journey begins
Their boat was waiting for them at Kingston just below the bridge. They stored their luggage in it and stepped in. With Harris at the sculls, and the writer at the tiller-lines, and Montmorency in the prow, they shot out on to the waters. it was to be their home for a fortnight.