Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

CHAPTER XI.

How George, once upon a time, got up early in the morning.—George, Harris, and Montmorency do not like the look of the cold water.—Heroism and determination on the part of J.—George and his shirt: story with a moral.—Harris as cook.—Historical retrospect, specially inserted for the use of schools.

I woke at six the next morning; and found George awake too.We both turned round, and tried to go to sleep again, but we could not.Had there been any particular reason why we should not have gone to sleep again, but have got up and dressed then and there, we should have dropped off while we were looking at our watches, and have slept till ten.As there was no earthly necessity for our getting up under another two hours at the very least, and our getting up at that time was an utter absurdity, it was only in keeping with the natural cussedness of things in general that we should both feel that lying down for five minutes more would be death to us.

George said that the same kind of thing, only worse, had happened to him some eighteen months ago, when he was lodging by himself in the house of a certain Mrs. Gippings.He said his watch went wrong one evening, and stopped at a quarter-past eight.He did not know this at the time because, for some reason or other, he forgot to wind it up when he went to bed (an unusual occurrence with him), and hung it up over his pillow without ever looking at the thing.

It was in the winter when this happened, very near the shortest day, and a week of fog into the bargain, so the fact that it was still very dark when George woke in the morning was no guide to him as to the time.He reached up, and hauled down his watch.It was a quarter-past eight.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”exclaimed George; “and here have I got to be in the City by nine.Why didn’t somebody call me?Oh, this is a shame!”And he flung the watch down, and sprang out of bed, and had a cold bath, and washed himself, and dressed himself, and shaved himself in cold water because there was not time to wait for the hot, and then rushed and had another look at the watch.

Whether the shaking it had received in being thrown down on the bed had started it, or how it was, George could not say, but certain it was that from a quarter-past eight it had begun to go, and now pointed to twenty minutes to nine.

George snatched it up, and rushed downstairs.In the sitting-room, all was dark and silent: there was no fire, no breakfast.George said it was a wicked shame of Mrs. G., and he made up his mind to tell her what he thought of her when he came home in the evening.Then he dashed on his great-coat and hat, and, seizing his umbrella, made for the front door.The door was not even unbolted.George anathematized Mrs. G.for a lazy old woman, and thought it was very strange that people could not get up at a decent, respectable time, unlocked and unbolted the door, and ran out.

He ran hard for a quarter of a mile, and at the end of that distance it began to be borne in upon him as a strange and curious thing that there were so few people about, and that there were no shops open.  It was certainly a very dark and foggy morning, but still it seemed an unusual course to stop all business on that account.    He had to go to business: why should other people stop in bed merely because it was dark and foggy!

At length he reached Holborn.Not a shutter was down!not a bus was about!There were three men in sight, one of whom was a policeman; a market-cart full of cabbages, and a dilapidated looking cab.George pulled out his watch and looked at it: it was five minutes to nine!He stood still and counted his pulse.He stooped down and felt his legs.Then, with his watch still in his hand, he went up to the policeman, and asked him if he knew what the time was.

“What’s the time?”said the man, eyeing George up and down with evident suspicion; “why, if you listen you will hear it strike.”

George listened, and a neighbouring clock immediately obliged.

“But it’s only gone three!”said George in an injured tone, when it had finished.

“Well, and how many did you want it to go?”replied the constable.

“Why, nine,” said George, showing his watch.

“Do you know where you live?”said the guardian of public order, severely.

George thought, and gave the address.

“Oh!that’s where it is, is it?”replied the man; “well, you take my advice and go there quietly, and take that watch of yours with you; and don’t let’s have any more of it.”

And George went home again, musing as he walked along, and let himself in.

At first, when he got in, he determined to undress and go to bed again; but when he thought of the redressing and re-washing, and the having of another bath, he determined he would not, but would sit up and go to sleep in the easy-chair.

But he could not get to sleep: he never felt more wakeful in his life; so he lit the lamp and got out the chess-board, and played himself a game of chess.But even that did not enliven him: it seemed slow somehow; so he gave chess up and tried to read.He did not seem able to take any sort of interest in reading either, so he put on his coat again and went out for a walk.

It was horribly lonesome and dismal, and all the policemen he met regarded him with undisguised suspicion, and turned their lanterns on him and followed him about, and this had such an effect upon him at last that he began to feel as if he really had done something, and he got to slinking down the by-streets and hiding in dark doorways when he heard the regulation flip-flop approaching.

Of course, this conduct made the force only more distrustful of him than ever, and they would come and rout him out and ask him what he was doing there; and when he answered, “Nothing,” he had merely come out for a stroll (it was then four o’clock in the morning), they looked as though they did not believe him, and two plain-clothes constables came home with him to see if he really did live where he had said he did.They saw him go in with his key, and then they took up a position opposite and watched the house.

He thought he would light the fire when he got inside, and make himself some breakfast, just to pass away the time; but he did not seem able to handle anything from a scuttleful of coals to a teaspoon without dropping it or falling over it, and making such a noise that he was in mortal fear that it would wake Mrs. G.up, and that she would think it was burglars and open the window and call “Police!”and then these two detectives would rush in and handcuff him, and march him off to the police-court.

He was in a morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart.So he gave up trying to get breakfast, and wrapped himself up in his overcoat and sat in the easy-chair till Mrs. G came down at half-past seven.

He said he had never got up too early since that morning: it had been such a warning to him.

We had been sitting huddled up in our rugs while George had been telling me this true story, and on his finishing it I set to work to wake up Harris with a scull.The third prod did it: and he turned over on the other side, and said he would be down in a minute, and that he would have his lace-up boots.We soon let him know where he was, however, by the aid of the hitcher, and he sat up suddenly, sending Montmorency, who had been sleeping the sleep of the just right on the middle of his chest, sprawling across the boat.

Then we pulled up the canvas, and all four of us poked our heads out over the off-side, and looked down at the water and shivered.The idea, overnight, had been that we should get up early in the morning, fling off our rugs and shawls, and, throwing back the canvas, spring into the river with a joyous shout, and revel in a long delicious swim.Somehow, now the morning had come, the notion seemed less tempting.The water looked damp and chilly: the wind felt cold.

“Well, who’s going to be first in?”said Harris at last.

There was no rush for precedence.George settled the matter so far as he was concerned by retiring into the boat and pulling on his socks.Montmorency gave vent to an involuntary howl, as if merely thinking of the thing had given him the horrors; and Harris said it would be so difficult to get into the boat again, and went back and sorted out his trousers.

I did not altogether like to give in, though I did not relish the plunge.There might be snags about, or weeds, I thought.I meant to compromise matters by going down to the edge and just throwing the water over myself; so I took a towel and crept out on the bank and wormed my way along on to the branch of a tree that dipped down into the water.

It was bitterly cold.The wind cut like a knife.I thought I would not throw the water over myself after all.I would go back into the boat and dress; and I turned to do so; and, as I turned, the silly branch gave way, and I and the towel went in together with a tremendous splash, and I was out mid-stream with a gallon of Thames water inside me before I knew what had happened.

“By Jove!old J.’s gone in,” I heard Harris say, as I came blowing to the surface.“I didn’t think he’d have the pluck to do it.Did you?”

“Is it all right?”sung out George.

“Lovely,” I spluttered back.“You are duffers not to come in.I wouldn’t have missed this for worlds.Why won’t you try it?It only wants a little determination.”

But I could not persuade them.

Rather an amusing thing happened while dressing that morning.I was very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water.It made me awfully wild, especially as George burst out laughing.I could not see anything to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more.I never saw a man laugh so much.I quite lost my temper with him at last, and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot he was; but he only roared the louder.And then, just as I was landing the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at all, but George’s, which I had mistaken for mine; whereupon the humour of the thing struck me for the first time, and I began to laugh.And the more I looked from George’s wet shirt to George, roaring with laughter, the more I was amused, and I laughed so much that I had to let the shirt fall back into the water again.

“Ar’n’t you—you—going to get it out?”said George, between his shrieks.

I could not answer him at all for a while, I was laughing so, but, at last, between my peals I managed to jerk out:

“It isn’t my shirt—it’s yours!”

I never saw a man’s face change from lively to severe so suddenly in all my life before.

“What!”he yelled, springing up.“You silly cuckoo!Why can’t you be more careful what you’re doing?Why the deuce don’t you go and dress on the bank?You’re not fit to be in a boat, you’re not.Gimme the hitcher.”

I tried to make him see the fun of the thing, but he could not.George is very dense at seeing a joke sometimes.

Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast.He said he would cook them.It seemed, from his account, that he was very good at doing scrambled eggs.He often did them at picnics and when out on yachts.He was quite famous for them.People who had once tasted his scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for any other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not get them.

It made our mouths water to hear him talk about the things, and we handed him out the stove and the frying-pan and all the eggs that had not smashed and gone over everything in the hamper, and begged him to begin.

He had some trouble in breaking the eggs—or rather not so much trouble in breaking them exactly as in getting them into the frying-pan when broken, and keeping them off his trousers, and preventing them from running up his sleeve; but he fixed some half-a-dozen into the pan at last, and then squatted down by the side of the stove and chivied them about with a fork.

It seemed harassing work, so far as George and I could judge.Whenever he went near the pan he burned himself, and then he would drop everything and dance round the stove, flicking his fingers about and cursing the things.Indeed, every time George and I looked round at him he was sure to be performing this feat.We thought at first that it was a necessary part of the culinary arrangements.

We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must be some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required dances and incantations for its proper cooking. Montmorency went and put his nose over it once, and the fat spluttered up and scalded him, and then he began dancing and cursing. Altogether it was one of the most interesting and exciting operations I have ever witnessed. George and I were both quite sorry when it was over.

The result was not altogether the success that Harris had anticipated.There seemed so little to show for the business.Six eggs had gone into the frying-pan, and all that came out was a teaspoonful of burnt and unappetizing looking mess.

Harris said it was the fault of the frying-pan, and thought it would have gone better if we had had a fish-kettle and a gas-stove; and we decided not to attempt the dish again until we had those aids to housekeeping by us.

The sun had got more powerful by the time we had finished breakfast, and the wind had dropped, and it was as lovely a morning as one could desire.Little was in sight to remind us of the nineteenth century; and, as we looked out upon the river in the morning sunlight, we could almost fancy that the centuries between us and that ever-to-be-famous June morning of 1215 had been drawn aside, and that we, English yeomen’s sons in homespun cloth, with dirk at belt, were waiting there to witness the writing of that stupendous page of history, the meaning whereof was to be translated to the common people some four hundred and odd years later by one Oliver Cromwell, who had deeply studied it.

It is a fine summer morning—sunny, soft, and still.But through the air there runs a thrill of coming stir.King John has slept at Duncroft Hall, and all the day before the little town of Staines has echoed to the clang of armed men, and the clatter of great horses over its rough stones, and the shouts of captains, and the grim oaths and surly jests of bearded bowmen, billmen, pikemen, and strange-speaking foreign spearmen.

Gay-cloaked companies of knights and squires have ridden in, all travel-stained and dusty.And all the evening long the timid townsmen’s doors have had to be quick opened to let in rough groups of soldiers, for whom there must be found both board and lodging, and the best of both, or woe betide the house and all within; for the sword is judge and jury, plaintiff and executioner, in these tempestuous times, and pays for what it takes by sparing those from whom it takes it, if it pleases it to do so.

Round the camp-fire in the market-place gather still more of the Barons’ troops, and eat and drink deep, and bellow forth roystering drinking songs, and gamble and quarrel as the evening grows and deepens into night.The firelight sheds quaint shadows on their piled-up arms and on their uncouth forms.  The children of the town steal round to watch them, wondering; and brawny country wenches, laughing, draw near to bandy ale-house jest and jibe with the swaggering troopers, so unlike the village swains, who, now despised, stand apart behind, with vacant grins upon their broad, peering faces.And out from the fields around, glitter the faint lights of more distant camps, as here some great lord’s followers lie mustered, and there false John’s French mercenaries hover like crouching wolves without the town.

And so, with sentinel in each dark street, and twinkling watch-fires on each height around, the night has worn away, and over this fair valley of old Thame has broken the morning of the great day that is to close so big with the fate of ages yet unborn.

Ever since grey dawn, in the lower of the two islands, just above where we are standing, there has been great clamour, and the sound of many workmen.The great pavilion brought there yester eve is being raised, and carpenters are busy nailing tiers of seats, while ’prentices from London town are there with many-coloured stuffs and silks and cloth of gold and silver.

And now, lo!down upon the road that winds along the river’s bank from Staines there come towards us, laughing and talking together in deep guttural bass, a half-a-score of stalwart halbert-men—Barons’ men, these—and halt at a hundred yards or so above us, on the other bank, and lean upon their arms, and wait.

And so, from hour to hour, march up along the road ever fresh groups and bands of armed men, their casques and breastplates flashing back the long low lines of morning sunlight, until, as far as eye can reach, the way seems thick with glittering steel and prancing steeds.And shouting horsemen are galloping from group to group, and little banners are fluttering lazily in the warm breeze, and every now and then there is a deeper stir as the ranks make way on either side, and some great Baron on his war-horse, with his guard of squires around him, passes along to take his station at the head of his serfs and vassals.

And up the slope of Cooper’s Hill, just opposite, are gathered the wondering rustics and curious townsfolk, who have run from Staines, and none are quite sure what the bustle is about, but each one has a different version of the great event that they have come to see; and some say that much good to all the people will come from this day’s work; but the old men shake their heads, for they have heard such tales before.

And all the river down to Staines is dotted with small craft and boats and tiny coracles—which last are growing out of favour now, and are used only by the poorer folk.Over the rapids, where in after years trim Bell Weir lock will stand, they have been forced or dragged by their sturdy rowers, and now are crowding up as near as they dare come to the great covered barges, which lie in readiness to bear King John to where the fateful Charter waits his signing.

It is noon, and we and all the people have been waiting patient for many an hour, and the rumour has run round that slippery John has again escaped from the Barons’ grasp, and has stolen away from Duncroft Hall with his mercenaries at his heels, and will soon be doing other work than signing charters for his people’s liberty.

Not so!This time the grip upon him has been one of iron, and he has slid and wriggled in vain.Far down the road a little cloud of dust has risen, and draws nearer and grows larger, and the pattering of many hoofs grows louder, and in and out between the scattered groups of drawn-up men, there pushes on its way a brilliant cavalcade of gay-dressed lords and knights.And front and rear, and either flank, there ride the yeomen of the Barons, and in the midst King John.

He rides to where the barges lie in readiness, and the great Barons step forth from their ranks to meet him.He greets them with a smile and laugh, and pleasant honeyed words, as though it were some feast in his honour to which he had been invited.But as he rises to dismount, he casts one hurried glance from his own French mercenaries drawn up in the rear to the grim ranks of the Barons’ men that hem him in.

Is it too late?One fierce blow at the unsuspecting horseman at his side, one cry to his French troops, one desperate charge upon the unready lines before him, and these rebellious Barons might rue the day they dared to thwart his plans!A bolder hand might have turned the game even at that point.Had it been a Richard there!the cup of liberty might have been dashed from England’s lips, and the taste of freedom held back for a hundred years.

But the heart of King John sinks before the stern faces of the English fighting men, and the arm of King John drops back on to his rein, and he dismounts and takes his seat in the foremost barge.And the Barons follow in, with each mailed hand upon the sword-hilt, and the word is given to let go.

Slowly the heavy, bright-decked barges leave the shore of Runningmede.Slowly against the swift current they work their ponderous way, till, with a low grumble, they grate against the bank of the little island that from this day will bear the name of Magna Charta Island.And King John has stepped upon the shore, and we wait in breathless silence till a great shout cleaves the air, and the great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty has, now we know, been firmly laid.

CHAPTER XII.

Henry VIII.and Anne Boleyn.—Disadvantages of living in same house with pair of lovers.—A trying time for the English nation.—A night search for the picturesque.—Homeless and houseless.—Harris prepares to die.—An angel comes along.—Effect of sudden joy on Harris.—A little supper.—Lunch.—High price for mustard.—A fearful battle.—Maidenhead.—Sailing.—Three fishers.—We are cursed.

I was sitting on the bank, conjuring up this scene to myself, when George remarked that when I was quite rested, perhaps I would not mind helping to wash up; and, thus recalled from the days of the glorious past to the prosaic present, with all its misery and sin, I slid down into the boat and cleaned out the frying-pan with a stick of wood and a tuft of grass, polishing it up finally with George’s wet shirt.

We went over to Magna Charta Island, and had a look at the stone which stands in the cottage there and on which the great Charter is said to have been signed; though, as to whether it really was signed there, or, as some say, on the other bank at “Runningmede,” I decline to commit myself.As far as my own personal opinion goes, however, I am inclined to give weight to the popular island theory.Certainly, had I been one of the Barons, at the time, I should have strongly urged upon my comrades the advisability of our getting such a slippery customer as King John on to the island, where there was less chance of surprises and tricks.

There are the ruins of an old priory in the grounds of Ankerwyke House, which is close to Picnic Point, and it was round about the grounds of this old priory that Henry VIII. is said to have waited for and met Anne Boleyn. He also used to meet her at Hever Castle in Kent, and also somewhere near St. Albans. It must have been difficult for the people of England in those days to have found a spot where these thoughtless young folk were not spooning.

Have you ever been in a house where there are a couple courting?It is most trying.You think you will go and sit in the drawing-room, and you march off there.As you open the door, you hear a noise as if somebody had suddenly recollected something, and, when you get in, Emily is over by the window, full of interest in the opposite side of the road, and your friend, John Edward, is at the other end of the room with his whole soul held in thrall by photographs of other people’s relatives.

“Oh!”you say, pausing at the door, “I didn’t know anybody was here.”

“Oh!didn’t you?”says Emily, coldly, in a tone which implies that she does not believe you.

You hang about for a bit, then you say:

“It’s very dark.Why don’t you light the gas?”

John Edward says, “Oh!”he hadn’t noticed it; and Emily says that papa does not like the gas lit in the afternoon.

You tell them one or two items of news, and give them your views and opinions on the Irish question; but this does not appear to interest them.All they remark on any subject is, “Oh!”“Is it?”“Did he?”“Yes,” and “You don’t say so!”And, after ten minutes of such style of conversation, you edge up to the door, and slip out, and are surprised to find that the door immediately closes behind you, and shuts itself, without your having touched it.

Half an hour later, you think you will try a pipe in the conservatory.The only chair in the place is occupied by Emily; and John Edward, if the language of clothes can be relied upon, has evidently been sitting on the floor.They do not speak, but they give you a look that says all that can be said in a civilised community; and you back out promptly and shut the door behind you.

You are afraid to poke your nose into any room in the house now; so, after walking up and down the stairs for a while, you go and sit in your own bedroom.This becomes uninteresting, however, after a time, and so you put on your hat and stroll out into the garden.You walk down the path, and as you pass the summer-house you glance in, and there are those two young idiots, huddled up into one corner of it; and they see you, and are evidently under the idea that, for some wicked purpose of your own, you are following them about.

“Why don’t they have a special room for this sort of thing, and make people keep to it?”you mutter; and you rush back to the hall and get your umbrella and go out.

It must have been much like this when that foolish boy Henry VIII.was courting his little Anne.People in Buckinghamshire would have come upon them unexpectedly when they were mooning round Windsor and Wraysbury, and have exclaimed, “Oh!you here!”and Henry would have blushed and said, “Yes; he’d just come over to see a man;” and Anne would have said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!Isn’t it funny?I’ve just met Mr. Henry VIII.in the lane, and he’s going the same way I am.”

Then those people would have gone away and said to themselves: “Oh!we’d better get out of here while this billing and cooing is on.We’ll go down to Kent.”

And they would go to Kent, and the first thing they would see in Kent, when they got there, would be Henry and Anne fooling round Hever Castle.

“Oh, drat this!”they would have said.“Here, let’s go away.I can’t stand any more of it.Let’s go to St.Albans—nice quiet place, St.Albans.”

And when they reached St.Albans, there would be that wretched couple, kissing under the Abbey walls.Then these folks would go and be pirates until the marriage was over.

From Picnic Point to Old Windsor Lock is a delightful bit of the river.A shady road, dotted here and there with dainty little cottages, runs by the bank up to the “Bells of Ouseley,” a picturesque inn, as most up-river inns are, and a place where a very good glass of ale may be drunk—so Harris says; and on a matter of this kind you can take Harris’s word.Old Windsor is a famous spot in its way.Edward the Confessor had a palace here, and here the great Earl Godwin was proved guilty by the justice of that age of having encompassed the death of the King’s brother.Earl Godwin broke a piece of bread and held it in his hand.

“If I am guilty,” said the Earl, “may this bread choke me when I eat it!”

Then he put the bread into his mouth and swallowed it, and it choked him, and he died.

After you pass Old Windsor, the river is somewhat uninteresting, and does not become itself again until you are nearing Boveney.George and I towed up past the Home Park, which stretches along the right bank from Albert to Victoria Bridge; and as we were passing Datchet, George asked me if I remembered our first trip up the river, and when we landed at Datchet at ten o’clock at night, and wanted to go to bed.

I answered that I did remember it.It will be some time before I forget it.

It was the Saturday before the August Bank Holiday.We were tired and hungry, we same three, and when we got to Datchet we took out the hamper, the two bags, and the rugs and coats, and such like things, and started off to look for diggings.We passed a very pretty little hotel, with clematis and creeper over the porch; but there was no honeysuckle about it, and, for some reason or other, I had got my mind fixed on honeysuckle, and I said:

“Oh, don’t let’s go in there!Let’s go on a bit further, and see if there isn’t one with honeysuckle over it.”

So we went on till we came to another hotel.That was a very nice hotel, too, and it had honey-suckle on it, round at the side; but Harris did not like the look of a man who was leaning against the front door.He said he didn’t look a nice man at all, and he wore ugly boots: so we went on further.We went a goodish way without coming across any more hotels, and then we met a man, and asked him to direct us to a few.

He said:

“Why, you are coming away from them.You must turn right round and go back, and then you will come to the Stag.”

We said:

“Oh, we had been there, and didn’t like it—no honeysuckle over it.”

“Well, then,” he said, “there’s the Manor House, just opposite.Have you tried that?”

Harris replied that we did not want to go there—didn’t like the looks of a man who was stopping there—Harris did not like the colour of his hair, didn’t like his boots, either.

“Well, I don’t know what you’ll do, I’m sure,” said our informant; “because they are the only two inns in the place.”

“No other inns!”exclaimed Harris.

“None,” replied the man.

“What on earth are we to do?”cried Harris.

Then George spoke up.He said Harris and I could get an hotel built for us, if we liked, and have some people made to put in.For his part, he was going back to the Stag.

The greatest minds never realise their ideals in any matter; and Harris and I sighed over the hollowness of all earthly desires, and followed George.

We took our traps into the Stag, and laid them down in the hall.

The landlord came up and said:

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

“Oh, good evening,” said George; “we want three beds, please.”

“Very sorry, sir,” said the landlord; “but I’m afraid we can’t manage it.”

“Oh, well, never mind,” said George, “two will do.Two of us can sleep in one bed, can’t we?”he continued, turning to Harris and me.

Harris said, “Oh, yes;” he thought George and I could sleep in one bed very easily.

“Very sorry, sir,” again repeated the landlord: “but we really haven’t got a bed vacant in the whole house.In fact, we are putting two, and even three gentlemen in one bed, as it is.”

This staggered us for a bit.

But Harris, who is an old traveller, rose to the occasion, and, laughing cheerily, said:

“Oh, well, we can’t help it.We must rough it.You must give us a shake-down in the billiard-room.”

“Very sorry, sir.Three gentlemen sleeping on the billiard-table already, and two in the coffee-room.Can’t possibly take you in to-night.”

We picked up our things, and went over to the Manor House.It was a pretty little place.I said I thought I should like it better than the other house; and Harris said, “Oh, yes,” it would be all right, and we needn’t look at the man with the red hair; besides, the poor fellow couldn’t help having red hair.

Harris spoke quite kindly and sensibly about it.

The people at the Manor House did not wait to hear us talk.The landlady met us on the doorstep with the greeting that we were the fourteenth party she had turned away within the last hour and a half.As for our meek suggestions of stables, billiard-room, or coal-cellars, she laughed them all to scorn: all these nooks had been snatched up long ago.

Did she know of any place in the whole village where we could get shelter for the night?

“Well, if we didn’t mind roughing it—she did not recommend it, mind—but there was a little beershop half a mile down the Eton road—”

We waited to hear no more; we caught up the hamper and the bags, and the coats and rugs, and parcels, and ran.The distance seemed more like a mile than half a mile, but we reached the place at last, and rushed, panting, into the bar.

The people at the beershop were rude.They merely laughed at us.There were only three beds in the whole house, and they had seven single gentlemen and two married couples sleeping there already.A kind-hearted bargeman, however, who happened to be in the tap-room, thought we might try the grocer’s, next door to the Stag, and we went back.

The grocer’s was full.An old woman we met in the shop then kindly took us along with her for a quarter of a mile, to a lady friend of hers, who occasionally let rooms to gentlemen.

This old woman walked very slowly, and we were twenty minutes getting to her lady friend’s.She enlivened the journey by describing to us, as we trailed along, the various pains she had in her back.

Her lady friend’s rooms were let.From there we were recommended to No.27.No.27 was full, and sent us to No.32, and 32 was full.

Then we went back into the high road, and Harris sat down on the hamper and said he would go no further.He said it seemed a quiet spot, and he would like to die there.He requested George and me to kiss his mother for him, and to tell all his relations that he forgave them and died happy.

At that moment an angel came by in the disguise of a small boy (and I cannot think of any more effective disguise an angel could have assumed), with a can of beer in one hand, and in the other something at the end of a string, which he let down on to every flat stone he came across, and then pulled up again, this producing a peculiarly unattractive sound, suggestive of suffering.

We asked this heavenly messenger (as we discovered him afterwards to be) if he knew of any lonely house, whose occupants were few and feeble (old ladies or paralysed gentlemen preferred), who could be easily frightened into giving up their beds for the night to three desperate men; or, if not this, could he recommend us to an empty pigstye, or a disused limekiln, or anything of that sort.He did not know of any such place—at least, not one handy; but he said that, if we liked to come with him, his mother had a room to spare, and could put us up for the night.

We fell upon his neck there in the moonlight and blessed him, and it would have made a very beautiful picture if the boy himself had not been so over-powered by our emotion as to be unable to sustain himself under it, and sunk to the ground, letting us all down on top of him.Harris was so overcome with joy that he fainted, and had to seize the boy’s beer-can and half empty it before he could recover consciousness, and then he started off at a run, and left George and me to bring on the luggage.

It was a little four-roomed cottage where the boy lived, and his mother—good soul!—gave us hot bacon for supper, and we ate it all—five pounds—and a jam tart afterwards, and two pots of tea, and then we went to bed.There were two beds in the room; one was a 2ft.6in.truckle bed, and George and I slept in that, and kept in by tying ourselves together with a sheet; and the other was the little boy’s bed, and Harris had that all to himself, and we found him, in the morning, with two feet of bare leg sticking out at the bottom, and George and I used it to hang the towels on while we bathed.

We were not so uppish about what sort of hotel we would have, next time we went to Datchet.

To return to our present trip: nothing exciting happened, and we tugged steadily on to a little below Monkey Island, where we drew up and lunched.We tackled the cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we had forgotten to bring any mustard.I don’t think I ever in my life, before or since, felt I wanted mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it then.I don’t care for mustard as a rule, and it is very seldom that I take it at all, but I would have given worlds for it then.

I don’t know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all.I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can’t get it.

Harris said he would have given worlds for mustard too.It would have been a good thing for anybody who had come up to that spot with a can of mustard, then: he would have been set up in worlds for the rest of his life.

But there! I daresay both Harris and I would have tried to back out of the bargain after we had got the mustard. One makes these extravagant offers in moments of excitement, but, of course, when one comes to think of it, one sees how absurdly out of proportion they are with the value of the required article. I heard a man, going up a mountain in Switzerland, once say he would give worlds for a glass of beer, and, when he came to a little shanty where they kept it, he kicked up a most fearful row because they charged him five francs for a bottle of Bass. He said it was a scandalous imposition, and he wrote to the Times about it.

It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard.We ate our beef in silence.Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting.We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed.We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine-apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us.We 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, uninjured, 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 up 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 hammered 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 unearthly 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.

Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river—steam-launches. The London Journal duke always has his “little place” at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband.

We went through Maidenhead quickly, and then eased up, and took leisurely that grand reach beyond Boulter’s and Cookham locks.Clieveden Woods still wore their dainty dress of spring, and rose up, from the water’s edge, in one long harmony of blended shades of fairy green.In its unbroken loveliness this is, perhaps, the sweetest stretch of all the river, and lingeringly we slowly drew our little boat away from its deep peace.

We pulled up in the backwater, just below Cookham, and had tea; and, when we were through the lock, it was evening.A stiffish breeze had sprung up—in our favour, for a wonder; for, as a rule on the river, the wind is always dead against you whatever way you go.It is against you in the morning, when you start for a day’s trip, and you pull a long distance, thinking how easy it will be to come back with the sail.Then, after tea, the wind veers round, and you have to pull hard in its teeth all the way home.

When you forget to take the sail at all, then the wind is consistently in your favour both ways.But there!this world is only a probation, and man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

This evening, however, they had evidently made a mistake, and had put the wind round at our back instead of in our face.We kept very quiet about it, and got the sail up quickly before they found it out, and then we spread ourselves about the boat in thoughtful attitudes, and the sail bellied out, and strained, and grumbled at the mast, and the boat flew.

I steered.

There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing.It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams.  The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where.You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature!Your heart is throbbing against hers!Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart!Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light!The voices of the air are singing to you.The earth seems far away and little; and the clouds, so close above your head, are brothers, and you stretch your arms to them.

We had the river to ourselves, except that, far in the distance, we could see a fishing-punt, moored in mid-stream, on which three fishermen sat; and we skimmed over the water, and passed the wooded banks, and no one spoke.

I was steering.

As we drew nearer, we could see that the three men fishing seemed old and solemn-looking men.They sat on three chairs in the punt, and watched intently their lines.And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds.It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing.The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night.

We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.

We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing.We did not know what had happened at first, because the sail shut out the view, but from the nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.

Harris let the sail down, and then we saw what had happened.We had knocked those three old gentlemen off their chairs into a general heap at the bottom of the boat, and they were now slowly and painfully sorting themselves out from each other, and picking fish off themselves; and as they worked, they cursed us—not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us—good, substantial curses.

Harris told them they ought to be grateful for a little excitement, sitting there fishing all day, and he also said that he was shocked and grieved to hear men their age give way to temper so.

But it did not do any good.

George said he would steer, after that.He said a mind like mine ought not to be expected to give itself away in steering boats—better let a mere commonplace human being see after that boat, before we jolly well all got drowned; and he took the lines, and brought us up to Marlow.

And at Marlow we left the boat by the bridge, and went and put up for the night at the “Crown.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Marlow.—Bisham Abbey.—The Medmenham Monks.—Montmorency thinks he will murder an old Tom cat.—But eventually decides that he will let it live.—Shameful conduct of a fox terrier at the Civil Service Stores.—Our departure from Marlow.—An imposing procession.—The steam launch, useful receipts for annoying and hindering it.—We decline to drink the river.—A peaceful dog.—Strange disappearance of Harris and a pie.

Marlow is one of the pleasantest river centres I know of.It is a bustling, lively little town; not very picturesque on the whole, it is true, but there are many quaint nooks and corners to be found in it, nevertheless—standing arches in the shattered bridge of Time, over which our fancy travels back to the days when Marlow Manor owned Saxon Algar for its lord, ere conquering William seized it to give to Queen Matilda, ere it passed to the Earls of Warwick or to worldly-wise Lord Paget, the councillor of four successive sovereigns.

There is lovely country round about it, too, if, after boating, you are fond of a walk, while the river itself is at its best here.Down to Cookham, past the Quarry Woods and the meadows, is a lovely reach.Dear old Quarry Woods!with your narrow, climbing paths, and little winding glades, how scented to this hour you seem with memories of sunny summer days!How haunted are your shadowy vistas with the ghosts of laughing faces!how from your whispering leaves there softly fall the voices of long ago!

From Marlow up to Sonning is even fairer yet.Grand old Bisham Abbey, whose stone walls have rung to the shouts of the Knights Templars, and which, at one time, was the home of Anne of Cleves and at another of Queen Elizabeth, is passed on the right bank just half a mile above Marlow Bridge.Bisham Abbey is rich in melodramatic properties.It contains a tapestry bed-chamber, and a secret room hid high up in the thick walls.The ghost of the Lady Holy, who beat her little boy to death, still walks there at night, trying to wash its ghostly hands clean in a ghostly basin.

Warwick, the king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did good service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right on the river’s bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are worth inspecting, they are the tombs and monuments in Bisham Church. It was while floating in his boat under the Bisham beeches that Shelley, who was then living at Marlow (you can see his house now, in West street), composed The Revolt of Islam

By Hurley Weir, a little higher up, I have often thought that I could stay a month without having sufficient time to drink in all the beauty of the scene.The village of Hurley, five minutes’ walk from the lock, is as old a little spot as there is on the river, dating, as it does, to quote the quaint phraseology of those dim days, “from the times of King Sebert and King Offa.”Just past the weir (going up) is Danes’ Field, where the invading Danes once encamped, during their march to Gloucestershire; and a little further still, nestling by a sweet corner of the stream, is what is left of Medmenham Abbey.

The famous Medmenham monks, or “Hell Fire Club,” as they were commonly called, and of whom the notorious Wilkes was a member, were a fraternity whose motto was “Do as you please,” and that invitation still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey.Many years before this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind, whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that were to follow them, five hundred years afterwards.

The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh, nor fish, nor eggs.They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to mass.They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all their lives there fell a silence as of death, for no one spoke.

A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright!Strange that Nature’s voices all around them—the soft singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind—should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this.They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

From Medmenham to sweet Hambledon Lock the river is full of peaceful beauty, but, after it passes Greenlands, the rather uninteresting looking river residence of my newsagent—a quiet unassuming old gentleman, who may often be met with about these regions, during the summer months, sculling himself along in easy vigorous style, or chatting genially to some old lock-keeper, as he passes through—until well the other side of Henley, it is somewhat bare and dull.

We got up tolerably early on the Monday morning at Marlow, and went for a bathe before breakfast; and, coming back, Montmorency made an awful ass of himself.The only subject on which Montmorency and I have any serious difference of opinion is cats.I like cats; Montmorency does not.

When I meet a cat, I say, “Poor Pussy!”and stop down and tickle the side of its head; and the cat sticks up its tail in a rigid, cast-iron manner, arches its back, and wipes its nose up against my trousers; and all is gentleness and peace.When Montmorency meets a cat, the whole street knows about it; and there is enough bad language wasted in ten seconds to last an ordinarily respectable man all his life, with care.

I do not blame the dog (contenting myself, as a rule, with merely clouting his head or throwing stones at him), because I take it that it is his nature.Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.

I remember being in the lobby of the Haymarket Stores one day, and all round about me were dogs, waiting for the return of their owners, who were shopping inside.There were a mastiff, and one or two collies, and a St.Bernard, a few retrievers and Newfoundlands, a boar-hound, a French poodle, with plenty of hair round its head, but mangy about the middle; a bull-dog, a few Lowther Arcade sort of animals, about the size of rats, and a couple of Yorkshire tykes.

There they sat, patient, good, and thoughtful.A solemn peacefulness seemed to reign in that lobby.An air of calmness and resignation—of gentle sadness pervaded the room.

Then a sweet young lady entered, leading a meek-looking little fox-terrier, and left him, chained up there, between the bull-dog and the poodle.He sat and looked about him for a minute.Then he cast up his eyes to the ceiling, and seemed, judging from his expression, to be thinking of his mother.Then he yawned.Then he looked round at the other dogs, all silent, grave, and dignified.

He looked at the bull-dog, sleeping dreamlessly on his right.He looked at the poodle, erect and haughty, on his left.Then, without a word of warning, without the shadow of a provocation, he bit that poodle’s near fore-leg, and a yelp of agony rang through the quiet shades of that lobby.

The result of his first experiment seemed highly satisfactory to him, and he determined to go on and make things lively all round.He sprang over the poodle and vigorously attacked a collie, and the collie woke up, and immediately commenced a fierce and noisy contest with the poodle.Then Foxey came back to his own place, and caught the bull-dog by the ear, and tried to throw him away; and the bull-dog, a curiously impartial animal, went for everything he could reach, including the hall-porter, which gave that dear little terrier the opportunity to enjoy an uninterrupted fight of his own with an equally willing Yorkshire tyke.

Anyone who knows canine nature need hardly, be told that, by this time, all the other dogs in the place were fighting as if their hearths and homes depended on the fray.The big dogs fought each other indiscriminately; and the little dogs fought among themselves, and filled up their spare time by biting the legs of the big dogs.

The whole lobby was a perfect pandemonium, and the din was terrific.A crowd assembled outside in the Haymarket, and asked if it was a vestry meeting; or, if not, who was being murdered, and why?Men came with poles and ropes, and tried to separate the dogs, and the police were sent for.

And in the midst of the riot that sweet young lady returned, and snatched up that sweet little dog of hers (he had laid the tyke up for a month, and had on the expression, now, of a new-born lamb) into her arms, and kissed him, and asked him if he was killed, and what those great nasty brutes of dogs had been doing to him; and he nestled up against her, and gazed up into her face with a look that seemed to say: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come to take me away from this disgraceful scene!”

She said that the people at the Stores had no right to allow great savage things like those other dogs to be put with respectable people’s dogs, and that she had a great mind to summon somebody.

Such is the nature of fox-terriers; and, therefore, I do not blame Montmorency for his tendency to row with cats; but he wished he had not given way to it that morning.

We were, as I have said, returning from a dip, and half-way up the High Street a cat darted out from one of the houses in front of us, and began to trot across the road.Montmorency gave a cry of joy—the cry of a stern warrior who sees his enemy given over to his hands—the sort of cry Cromwell might have uttered when the Scots came down the hill—and flew after his prey.

His victim was a large black Tom.I never saw a larger cat, nor a more disreputable-looking cat.It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose.It was a long, sinewy-looking animal.It had a calm, contented air about it.

Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour; but the cat did not hurry up—did not seem to have grasped the idea that its life was in danger.It trotted quietly on until its would-be assassin was within a yard of it, and then it turned round and sat down in the middle of the road, and looked at Montmorency with a gentle, inquiring expression, that said:

“Yes!You want me?”

Montmorency does not lack pluck; but there was something about the look of that cat that might have chilled the heart of the boldest dog.He stopped abruptly, and looked back at Tom.

Neither spoke; but the conversation that one could imagine was clearly as follows:—

The Cat: “Can I do anything for you?”

Montmorency: “No—no, thanks.”

The Cat: “Don’t you mind speaking, if you really want anything, you know.”

Montmorency (backing down the High Street): “Oh, no—not at all—certainly—don’t you trouble.I—I am afraid I’ve made a mistake.I thought I knew you.Sorry I disturbed you.”

The Cat: “Not at all—quite a pleasure.Sure you don’t want anything, now?”

Montmorency (still backing): “Not at all, thanks—not at all—very kind of you.Good morning.”

The Cat: “Good-morning.”

Then the cat rose, and continued his trot; and Montmorency, fitting what he calls his tail carefully into its groove, came back to us, and took up an unimportant position in the rear.

To this day, if you say the word “Cats!”to Montmorency, he will visibly shrink and look up piteously at you, as if to say:

“Please don’t.”

We did our marketing after breakfast, and revictualled the boat for three days.George said we ought to take vegetables—that it was unhealthy not to eat vegetables.He said they were easy enough to cook, and that he would see to that; so we got ten pounds of potatoes, a bushel of peas, and a few cabbages.We got a beefsteak pie, a couple of gooseberry tarts, and a leg of mutton from the hotel; and fruit, and cakes, and bread and butter, and jam, and bacon and eggs, and other things we foraged round about the town for.

Our departure from Marlow I regard as one of our greatest successes.It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious.We had insisted at all the shops we had been to that the things should be sent with us then and there.None of your “Yes, sir, I will send them off at once: the boy will be down there before you are, sir!”and then fooling about on the landing-stage, and going back to the shop twice to have a row about them, for us.We waited while the basket was packed, and took the boy with us.

We went to a good many shops, adopting this principle at each one; and the consequence was that, by the time we had finished, we had as fine a collection of boys with baskets following us around as heart could desire; and our final march down the middle of the High Street, to the river, must have been as imposing a spectacle as Marlow had seen for many a long day.

The order of the procession was as follows:—

Montmorency, carrying a stick.
Two disreputable-looking curs, friends of Montmorency’s.
George, carrying coats and rugs, and smoking a short pipe.
Harris, trying to walk with easy grace,
while carrying a bulged-out Gladstone bag in one hand
and a bottle of lime-juice in the other.
Greengrocer’s boy and baker’s boy,
with baskets.
Boots from the hotel, carrying hamper.
Confectioner’s boy, with basket.
Grocer’s boy, with basket.
Long-haired dog.
Cheesemonger’s boy, with basket.
Odd man carrying a bag.
Bosom companion of odd man, with his hands in his pockets,
smoking a short clay.
Fruiterer’s boy, with basket.
Myself, carrying three hats and a pair of boots,
and trying to look as if I didn’t know it.
Six small boys, and four stray dogs.

When we got down to the landing-stage, the boatman said:

“Let me see, sir; was yours a steam-launch or a house-boat?”

On our informing him it was a double-sculling skiff, he seemed surprised.

We had a good deal of trouble with steam launches that morning.It was just before the Henley week, and they were going up in large numbers; some by themselves, some towing houseboats.I do hate steam launches: I suppose every rowing man does.I never see a steam launch but I feel I should like to lure it to a lonely part of the river, and there, in the silence and the solitude, strangle it.

There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch that has the knack of rousing every evil instinct in my nature, and I yearn for the good old days, when you could go about and tell people what you thought of them with a hatchet and a bow and arrows.The expression on the face of the man who, with his hands in his pockets, stands by the stern, smoking a cigar, is sufficient to excuse a breach of the peace by itself; and the lordly whistle for you to get out of the way would, I am confident, ensure a verdict of “justifiable homicide” from any jury of river men.

They used to have to whistle for us to get out of their way. If I may do so, without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the other craft on the river put together.

“Steam launch, coming!”one of us would cry out, on sighting the enemy in the distance; and, in an instant, everything was got ready to receive her.I would take the lines, and Harris and George would sit down beside me, all of us with our backs to the launch, and the boat would drift out quietly into mid-stream.

On would come the launch, whistling, and on we would go, drifting.At about a hundred yards off, she would start whistling like mad, and the people would come and lean over the side, and roar at us; but we never heard them!Harris would be telling us an anecdote about his mother, and George and I would not have missed a word of it for worlds.

Then that launch would give one final shriek of a whistle that would nearly burst the boiler, and she would reverse her engines, and blow off steam, and swing round and get aground; everyone on board of it would rush to the bow and yell at us, and the people on the bank would stand and shout to us, and all the other passing boats would stop and join in, till the whole river for miles up and down was in a state of frantic commotion.And then Harris would break off in the most interesting part of his narrative, and look up with mild surprise, and say to George:

“Why, George, bless me, if here isn’t a steam launch!”

And George would answer:

“Well, do you know, I thought I heard something!”

Upon which we would get nervous and confused, and not know how to get the boat out of the way, and the people in the launch would crowd round and instruct us:

“Pull your right—you, you idiot! back with your left. No, not you—the other one—leave the lines alone, can’t you—now, both together. NOT that way. Oh, you—!”

Then they would lower a boat and come to our assistance; and, after quarter of an hour’s effort, would get us clean out of their way, so that they could go on; and we would thank them so much, and ask them to give us a tow.But they never would.

Another good way we discovered of irritating the aristocratic type of steam launch, was to mistake them for a beanfeast, and ask them if they were Messrs.Cubit’s lot or the Bermondsey Good Templars, and could they lend us a saucepan.

Old ladies, not accustomed to the river, are always intensely nervous of steam launches.I remember going up once from Staines to Windsor—a stretch of water peculiarly rich in these mechanical monstrosities—with a party containing three ladies of this description.It was very exciting.At the first glimpse of every steam launch that came in view, they insisted on landing and sitting down on the bank until it was out of sight again.They said they were very sorry, but that they owed it to their families not to be fool-hardy.

We found ourselves short of water at Hambledon Lock; so we took our jar and went up to the lock-keeper’s house to beg for some.

George was our spokesman.He put on a winning smile, and said:

“Oh, please could you spare us a little water?”

“Certainly,” replied the old gentleman; “take as much as you want, and leave the rest.”

“Thank you so much,” murmured George, looking about him.“Where—where do you keep it?”

“It’s always in the same place my boy,” was the stolid reply: “just behind you.”

“I don’t see it,” said George, turning round.

“Why, bless us, where’s your eyes?”was the man’s comment, as he twisted George round and pointed up and down the stream.“There’s enough of it to see, ain’t there?”

“Oh!”exclaimed George, grasping the idea; “but we can’t drink the river, you know!”

“No; but you can drink some of it,” replied the old fellow. “It’s what I’ve drunk for the last fifteen years.”

George told him that his appearance, after the course, did not seem a sufficiently good advertisement for the brand; and that he would prefer it out of a pump.

We got some from a cottage a little higher up. I daresay that was only river water, if we had known. But we did not know, so it was all right. What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over.

We tried river water once, later on in the season, but it was not a success.We were coming down stream, and had pulled up to have tea in a backwater near Windsor.Our jar was empty, and it was a case of going without our tea or taking water from the river.Harris was for chancing it.He said it must be all right if we boiled the water.He said that the various germs of poison present in the water would be killed by the boiling.So we filled our kettle with Thames backwater, and boiled it; and very careful we were to see that it did boil.

We had made the tea, and were just settling down comfortably to drink it, when George, with his cup half-way to his lips, paused and exclaimed:

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”asked Harris and I.

“Why that!”said George, looking westward.

Harris and I followed his gaze, and saw, coming down towards us on the sluggish current, a dog.It was one of the quietest and peacefullest dogs I have ever seen.I never met a dog who seemed more contented—more easy in its mind.It was floating dreamily on its back, with its four legs stuck up straight into the air.It was what I should call a full-bodied dog, with a well-developed chest.On he came, serene, dignified, and calm, until he was abreast of our boat, and there, among the rushes, he eased up, and settled down cosily for the evening.

George said he didn’t want any tea, and emptied his cup into the water.Harris did not feel thirsty, either, and followed suit.I had drunk half mine, but I wished I had not.

I asked George if he thought I was likely to have typhoid.

He said: “Oh, no;” he thought I had a very good chance indeed of escaping it.Anyhow, I should know in about a fortnight, whether I had or had not.

We went up the backwater to Wargrave.It is a short cut, leading out of the right-hand bank about half a mile above Marsh Lock, and is well worth taking, being a pretty, shady little piece of stream, besides saving nearly half a mile of distance.

Of course, its entrance is studded with posts and chains, and surrounded with notice boards, menacing all kinds of torture, imprisonment, and death to everyone who dares set scull upon its waters—I wonder some of these riparian boors don’t claim the air of the river and threaten everyone with forty shillings fine who breathes it—but the posts and chains a little skill will easily avoid; and as for the boards, you might, if you have five minutes to spare, and there is nobody about, take one or two of them down and throw them into the river.

Half-way up the backwater, we got out and lunched; and it was during this lunch that George and I received rather a trying shock.

Harris received a shock, too; but I do not think Harris’s shock could have been anything like so bad as the shock that George and I had over the business.

You see, it was in this way: we were sitting in a meadow, about ten yards from the water’s edge, and we had just settled down comfortably to feed.Harris had the beefsteak pie between his knees, and was carving it, and George and I were waiting with our plates ready.

“Have you got a spoon there?”says Harris; “I want a spoon to help the gravy with.”

The hamper was close behind us, and George and I both turned round to reach one out.We were not five seconds getting it.When we looked round again, Harris and the pie were gone!

It was a wide, open field.There was not a tree or a bit of hedge for hundreds of yards.He could not have tumbled into the river, because we were on the water side of him, and he would have had to climb over us to do it.

George and I gazed all about.Then we gazed at each other.

“Has he been snatched up to heaven?”I queried.

“They’d hardly have taken the pie too,” said George.

There seemed weight in this objection, and we discarded the heavenly theory.

“I suppose the truth of the matter is,” suggested George, descending to the commonplace and practicable, “that there has been an earthquake.”

And then he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice: “I wish he hadn’t been carving that pie.”

With a sigh, we turned our eyes once more towards the spot where Harris and the pie had last been seen on earth; and there, as our blood froze in our veins and our hair stood up on end, we saw Harris’s head—and nothing but his head—sticking bolt upright among the tall grass, the face very red, and bearing upon it an expression of great indignation!

George was the first to recover.

“Speak!”he cried, “and tell us whether you are alive or dead—and where is the rest of you?”

“Oh, don’t be a stupid ass!”said Harris’s head.“I believe you did it on purpose.”

“Did what?”exclaimed George and I.

“Why, put me to sit here—darn silly trick!Here, catch hold of the pie.”

And out of the middle of the earth, as it seemed to us, rose the pie—very much mixed up and damaged; and, after it, scrambled Harris—tumbled, grubby, and wet.

He had been sitting, without knowing it, on the very verge of a small gully, the long grass hiding it from view; and in leaning a little back he had shot over, pie and all.

He said he had never felt so surprised in all his life, as when he first felt himself going, without being able to conjecture in the slightest what had happened.He thought at first that the end of the world had come.

Harris believes to this day that George and I planned it all beforehand.Thus does unjust suspicion follow even the most blameless for, as the poet says, “Who shall escape calumny?”

Who, indeed!

CHAPTER XIV.

Wargrave.—Waxworks.—Sonning.—Our stew.—Montmorency is sarcastic.—Fight between Montmorency and the tea-kettle.—George’s banjo studies.—Meet with discouragement.—Difficulties in the way of the musical amateur.—Learning to play the bagpipes.—Harris feels sad after supper.—George and I go for a walk.—Return hungry and wet.—There is a strangeness about Harris.—Harris and the swans, a remarkable story.—Harris has a troubled night.

We caught a breeze, after lunch, which took us gently up past Wargrave and Shiplake.Mellowed in the drowsy sunlight of a summer’s afternoon, Wargrave, nestling where the river bends, makes a sweet old picture as you pass it, and one that lingers long upon the retina of memory.

The “George and Dragon” at Wargrave boasts a sign, painted on the one side by Leslie, R.A., and on the other by Hodgson of that ilk.Leslie has depicted the fight; Hodgson has imagined the scene, “After the Fight”—George, the work done, enjoying his pint of beer.

Day, the author of Sandford and Merton, lived and—more credit to the place still—was killed at Wargrave.In the church is a memorial to Mrs. Sarah Hill, who bequeathed 1 pound annually, to be divided at Easter, between two boys and two girls who “have never been undutiful to their parents; who have never been known to swear or to tell untruths, to steal, or to break windows.”Fancy giving up all that for five shillings a year!It is not worth it.

It is rumoured in the town that once, many years ago, a boy appeared who really never had done these things—or at all events, which was all that was required or could be expected, had never been known to do them—and thus won the crown of glory.He was exhibited for three weeks afterwards in the Town Hall, under a glass case.

What has become of the money since no one knows.They say it is always handed over to the nearest wax-works show.

Shiplake is a pretty village, but it cannot be seen from the river, being upon the hill.Tennyson was married in Shiplake Church.

The river up to Sonning winds in and out through many islands, and is very placid, hushed, and lonely.Few folk, except at twilight, a pair or two of rustic lovers, walk along its banks.’Arry and Lord Fitznoodle have been left behind at Henley, and dismal, dirty Reading is not yet reached.It is a part of the river in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and faces, and things that might have been, but are not, confound them.

We got out at Sonning, and went for a walk round the village.It is the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river.It is more like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar.Every house is smothered in roses, and now, in early June, they were bursting forth in clouds of dainty splendour.If you stop at Sonning, put up at the “Bull,” behind the church.It is a veritable picture of an old country inn, with green, square courtyard in front, where, on seats beneath the trees, the old men group of an evening to drink their ale and gossip over village politics; with low, quaint rooms and latticed windows, and awkward stairs and winding passages.

We roamed about sweet Sonning for an hour or so, and then, it being too late to push on past Reading, we decided to go back to one of the Shiplake islands, and put up there for the night.It was still early when we got settled, and George said that, as we had plenty of time, it would be a splendid opportunity to try a good, slap-up supper.He said he would show us what could be done up the river in the way of cooking, and suggested that, with the vegetables and the remains of the cold beef and general odds and ends, we should make an Irish stew.

It seemed a fascinating idea.George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes.I should never have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking.The job turned out to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in.We began cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished.The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left—at least none worth speaking of.George came and had a look at it—it was about the size of a pea-nut.He said:

“Oh, that won’t do!You’re wasting them.You must scrape them.”

So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling.They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes—all bumps and warts and hollows.We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes.Then we struck.We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves.

I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess.It seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes.It shows you what can be done with economy and care.

George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling.We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas.George stirred it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added them to the stew.There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in.Then George found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.

He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of things.I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those in.George said they would thicken the gravy.

I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.

We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not.Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent.He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments.

Harris said:

“If you never try a new thing, how can you tell what it’s like?It’s men such as you that hamper the world’s progress.Think of the man who first tried German sausage!”

It was a great success, that Irish stew.I don’t think I ever enjoyed a meal more.There was something so fresh and piquant about it.One’s palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish with a new flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth.

And it was nourishing, too.As George said, there was good stuff in it.The peas and potatoes might have been a bit softer, but we all had good teeth, so that did not matter much: and as for the gravy, it was a poem—a little too rich, perhaps, for a weak stomach, but nutritious.

We finished up with tea and cherry tart.Montmorency had a fight with the kettle during tea-time, and came off a poor second.

Throughout the trip, he had manifested great curiosity concerning the kettle.He would sit and watch it, as it boiled, with a puzzled expression, and would try and rouse it every now and then by growling at it.When it began to splutter and steam, he regarded it as a challenge, and would want to fight it, only, at that precise moment, some one would always dash up and bear off his prey before he could get at it.

To-day he determined he would be beforehand.At the first sound the kettle made, he rose, growling, and advanced towards it in a threatening attitude.It was only a little kettle, but it was full of pluck, and it up and spit at him.

“Ah!would ye!”growled Montmorency, showing his teeth; “I’ll teach ye to cheek a hard-working, respectable dog; ye miserable, long-nosed, dirty-looking scoundrel, ye.Come on!”

And he rushed at that poor little kettle, and seized it by the spout.

Then, across the evening stillness, broke a blood-curdling yelp, and Montmorency left the boat, and did a constitutional three times round the island at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, stopping every now and then to bury his nose in a bit of cool mud.

From that day Montmorency regarded the kettle with a mixture of awe, suspicion, and hate.Whenever he saw it he would growl and back at a rapid rate, with his tail shut down, and the moment it was put upon the stove he would promptly climb out of the boat, and sit on the bank, till the whole tea business was over.

George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it.George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.

Harris said he would rather have the headache.

George has never learned to play the banjo to this day.He has had too much all-round discouragement to meet.He tried on two or three evenings, while we were up the river, to get a little practice, but it was never a success.Harris’s language used to be enough to unnerve any man; added to which, Montmorency would sit and howl steadily, right through the performance.It was not giving the man a fair chance.

“What’s he want to howl like that for when I’m playing?”George would exclaim indignantly, while taking aim at him with a boot.

“What do you want to play like that for when he is howling?” Harris would retort, catching the boot. “You let him alone. He can’t help howling. He’s got a musical ear, and your playing makes him howl.”

So George determined to postpone study of the banjo until he reached home.But he did not get much opportunity even there.Mrs. P.used to come up and say she was very sorry—for herself, she liked to hear him—but the lady upstairs was in a very delicate state, and the doctor was afraid it might injure the child.

Then George tried taking it out with him late at night, and practising round the square.But the inhabitants complained to the police about it, and a watch was set for him one night, and he was captured.The evidence against him was very clear, and he was bound over to keep the peace for six months.

He seemed to lose heart in the business after that.He did make one or two feeble efforts to take up the work again when the six months had elapsed, but there was always the same coldness—the same want of sympathy on the part of the world to fight against; and, after awhile, he despaired altogether, and advertised the instrument for sale at a great sacrifice—“owner having no further use for same”—and took to learning card tricks instead.

It must be disheartening work learning a musical instrument.You would think that Society, for its own sake, would do all it could to assist a man to acquire the art of playing a musical instrument.But it doesn’t!

I knew a young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes, and you would be surprised at the amount of opposition he had to contend with.Why, not even from the members of his own family did he receive what you could call active encouragement.His father was dead against the business from the beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly on the subject.

My friend used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had to give that plan up, because of his sister.She was somewhat religiously inclined, and she said it seemed such an awful thing to begin the day like that.

So he sat up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to bed, but that did not do, as it got the house such a bad name.People, going home late, would stop outside to listen, and then put it about all over the town, the next morning, that a fearful murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson’s the night before; and would describe how they had heard the victim’s shrieks and the brutal oaths and curses of the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and the last dying gurgle of the corpse.

So they let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all the doors shut; but his more successful passages could generally be heard in the sitting-room, in spite of these precautions, and would affect his mother almost to tears.

She said it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed by a shark, poor man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea—where the connection came in, she could not explain).

Then they knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the garden, about quarter of a mile from the house, and made him take the machine down there when he wanted to work it; and sometimes a visitor would come to the house who knew nothing of the matter, and they would forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and he would go out for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot of those bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was.If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

There is, it must be confessed, something very sad about the early efforts of an amateur in bagpipes.I have felt that myself when listening to my young friend.They appear to be a trying instrument to perform upon.You have to get enough breath for the whole tune before you start—at least, so I gathered from watching Jefferson.

He would begin magnificently with a wild, full, come-to-the-battle sort of a note, that quite roused you.But he would get more and more piano as he went on, and the last verse generally collapsed in the middle with a splutter and a hiss.

You want to be in good health to play the bagpipes.

Young Jefferson only learnt to play one tune on those bagpipes; but I never heard any complaints about the insufficiency of his repertoire—none whatever.This tune was “The Campbells are Coming, Hooray—Hooray!”so he said, though his father always held that it was “The Blue Bells of Scotland.”Nobody seemed quite sure what it was exactly, but they all agreed that it sounded Scotch.

Strangers were allowed three guesses, and most of them guessed a different tune each time.

Harris was disagreeable after supper,—I think it must have been the stew that had upset him: he is not used to high living,—so George and I left him in the boat, and settled to go for a mouch round Henley.He said he should have a glass of whisky and a pipe, and fix things up for the night.We were to shout when we returned, and he would row over from the island and fetch us.

“Don’t go to sleep, old man,” we said as we started.

“Not much fear of that while this stew’s on,” he grunted, as he pulled back to the island.

Henley was getting ready for the regatta, and was full of bustle.We met a goodish number of men we knew about the town, and in their pleasant company the time slipped by somewhat quickly; so that it was nearly eleven o’clock before we set off on our four-mile walk home—as we had learned to call our little craft by this time.

It was a dismal night, coldish, with a thin rain falling; and as we trudged through the dark, silent fields, talking low to each other, and wondering if we were going right or not, we thought of the cosy boat, with the bright light streaming through the tight-drawn canvas; of Harris and Montmorency, and the whisky, and wished that we were there.

We conjured up the picture of ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry; of the gloomy river and the shapeless trees; and, like a giant glow-worm underneath them, our dear old boat, so snug and warm and cheerful.We could see ourselves at supper there, pecking away at cold meat, and passing each other chunks of bread; we could hear the cheery clatter of our knives, the laughing voices, filling all the space, and overflowing through the opening out into the night.And we hurried on to realise the vision.

We struck the tow-path at length, and that made us happy; because prior to this we had not been sure whether we were walking towards the river or away from it, and when you are tired and want to go to bed uncertainties like that worry you.We passed Skiplake as the clock was striking the quarter to twelve; and then George said, thoughtfully:

“You don’t happen to remember which of the islands it was, do you?”

“No,” I replied, beginning to grow thoughtful too, “I don’t.How many are there?”

“Only four,” answered George.“It will be all right, if he’s awake.”

“And if not?”I queried; but we dismissed that train of thought.

We shouted when we came opposite the first island, but there was no response; so we went to the second, and tried there, and obtained the same result.

“Oh!I remember now,” said George; “it was the third one.”

And we ran on hopefully to the third one, and hallooed.

No answer!

The case was becoming serious.it was now past midnight.The hotels at Skiplake and Henley would be crammed; and we could not go round, knocking up cottagers and householders in the middle of the night, to know if they let apartments!George suggested walking back to Henley and assaulting a policeman, and so getting a night’s lodging in the station-house.But then there was the thought, “Suppose he only hits us back and refuses to lock us up!”

We could not pass the whole night fighting policemen.Besides, we did not want to overdo the thing and get six months.

We despairingly tried what seemed in the darkness to be the fourth island, but met with no better success.The rain was coming down fast now, and evidently meant to last.We were wet to the skin, and cold and miserable.We began to wonder whether there were only four islands or more, or whether we were near the islands at all, or whether we were anywhere within a mile of where we ought to be, or in the wrong part of the river altogether; everything looked so strange and different in the darkness.We began to understand the sufferings of the Babes in the Wood.

Just when we had given up all hope—yes, I know that is always the time that things do happen in novels and tales; but I can’t help it.I resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so I will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose.

It was just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so. Just when we had given up all hope, then, I suddenly caught sight, a little way below us, of a strange, weird sort of glimmer flickering among the trees on the opposite bank. For an instant I thought of ghosts: it was such a shadowy, mysterious light. The next moment it flashed across me that it was our boat, and I sent up such a yell across the water that made the night seem to shake in its bed.

We waited breathless for a minute, and then—oh!divinest music of the darkness!—we heard the answering bark of Montmorency.We shouted back loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers—I never could understand myself why it should take more noise to wake seven sleepers than one—and, after what seemed an hour, but what was really, I suppose, about five minutes, we saw the lighted boat creeping slowly over the blackness, and heard Harris’s sleepy voice asking where we were.

There was an unaccountable strangeness about Harris.It was something more than mere ordinary tiredness.He pulled the boat against a part of the bank from which it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and immediately went to sleep.It took us an immense amount of screaming and roaring to wake him up again and put some sense into him; but we succeeded at last, and got safely on board.

Harris had a sad expression on him, so we noticed, when we got into the boat.He gave you the idea of a man who had been through trouble.We asked him if anything had happened, and he said—

“Swans!”

It seemed we had moored close to a swan’s nest, and, soon after George and I had gone, the female swan came back, and kicked up a row about it.Harris had chivied her off, and she had gone away, and fetched up her old man.Harris said he had had quite a fight with these two swans; but courage and skill had prevailed in the end, and he had defeated them.

Half-an-hour afterwards they returned with eighteen other swans!It must have been a fearful battle, so far as we could understand Harris’s account of it.The swans had tried to drag him and Montmorency out of the boat and drown them; and he had defended himself like a hero for four hours, and had killed the lot, and they had all paddled away to die.

“How many swans did you say there were?”asked George.

“Thirty-two,” replied Harris, sleepily.

“You said eighteen just now,” said George.

“No, I didn’t,” grunted Harris; “I said twelve.Think I can’t count?”

What were the real facts about these swans we never found out.We questioned Harris on the subject in the morning, and he said, “What swans?”and seemed to think that George and I had been dreaming.

Oh, how delightful it was to be safe in the boat, after our trials and fears!We ate a hearty supper, George and I, and we should have had some toddy after it, if we could have found the whisky, but we could not.We examined Harris as to what he had done with it; but he did not seem to know what we meant by “whisky,” or what we were talking about at all.Montmorency looked as if he knew something, but said nothing.

I slept well that night, and should have slept better if it had not been for Harris.I have a vague recollection of having been woke up at least a dozen times during the night by Harris wandering about the boat with the lantern, looking for his clothes.He seemed to be worrying about his clothes all night.

Twice he routed up George and myself to see if we were lying on his trousers.George got quite wild the second time.

“What the thunder do you want your trousers for, in the middle of the night?”he asked indignantly.“Why don’t you lie down, and go to sleep?”

I found him in trouble, the next time I awoke, because he could not find his socks; and my last hazy remembrance is of being rolled over on my side, and of hearing Harris muttering something about its being an extraordinary thing where his umbrella could have got to.

CHAPTER XV.

Household duties.—Love of work.—The old river hand, what he does and what he tells you he has done.—Scepticism of the new generation.—Early boating recollections.—Rafting.—George does the thing in style.—The old boatman, his method.—So calm, so full of peace.—The beginner.—Punting.—A sad accident.—Pleasures of friendship.—Sailing, my first experience.—Possible reason why we were not drowned.

We woke late the next morning, and, at Harris’s earnest desire, partook of a plain breakfast, with “non dainties.”Then we cleaned up, and put everything straight (a continual labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear insight into a question that had often posed me—namely, how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands manages to pass away her time), and, at about ten, set out on what we had determined should be a good day’s journey.

We agreed that we would pull this morning, as a change from towing; and Harris thought the best arrangement would be that George and I should scull, and he steer.I did not chime in with this idea at all; I said I thought Harris would have been showing a more proper spirit if he had suggested that he and George should work, and let me rest a bit.It seemed to me that I was doing more than my fair share of the work on this trip, and I was beginning to feel strongly on the subject.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do.It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me.I can sit and look at it for hours.I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more.I shall have to throw out a wing soon.

And I am careful of my work, too.Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it.I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it.No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.

But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair.I do not ask for more than my proper share.

But I get it without asking for it—at least, so it appears to me—and this worries me.

George says he does not think I need trouble myself on the subject.He thinks it is only my over-scrupulous nature that makes me fear I am having more than my due; and that, as a matter of fact, I don’t have half as much as I ought.But I expect he only says this to comfort me.

In a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything.Harris’s notion was, that it was he alone who had been working, and that both George and I had been imposing upon him.George, on the other hand, ridiculed the idea of Harris’s having done anything more than eat and sleep, and had a cast-iron opinion that it was he—George himself—who had done all the labour worth speaking of.

He said he had never been out with such a couple of lazily skulks as Harris and I.

That amused Harris.

“Fancy old George talking about work!”he laughed; “why, about half-an-hour of it would kill him.Have you ever seen George work?”he added, turning to me.

I agreed with Harris that I never had—most certainly not since we had started on this trip.

“Well, I don’t see how you can know much about it, one way or the other,” George retorted on Harris; “for I’m blest if you haven’t been asleep half the time. Have you ever seen Harris fully awake, except at meal-time?” asked George, addressing me.

Truth compelled me to support George.Harris had been very little good in the boat, so far as helping was concerned, from the beginning.

“Well, hang it all, I’ve done more than old J., anyhow,” rejoined Harris.

“Well, you couldn’t very well have done less,” added George.

“I suppose J.thinks he is the passenger,” continued Harris.

And that was their gratitude to me for having brought them and their wretched old boat all the way up from Kingston, and for having superintended and managed everything for them, and taken care of them, and slaved for them.It is the way of the world.

We settled the present difficulty by arranging that Harris and George should scull up past Reading, and that I should tow the boat on from there.Pulling a heavy boat against a strong stream has few attractions for me now.There was a time, long ago, when I used to clamour for the hard work: now I like to give the youngsters a chance.

I notice that most of the old river hands are similarly retiring, whenever there is any stiff pulling to be done.You can always tell the old river hand by the way in which he stretches himself out upon the cushions at the bottom of the boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes about the marvellous feats he performed last season.

“Call what you’re doing hard work!”he drawls, between his contented whiffs, addressing the two perspiring novices, who have been grinding away steadily up stream for the last hour and a half; “why, Jim Biffles and Jack and I, last season, pulled up from Marlow to Goring in one afternoon—never stopped once.Do you remember that, Jack?”

Jack, who has made himself a bed up in the prow of all the rugs and coats he can collect, and who has been lying there asleep for the last two hours, partially wakes up on being thus appealed to, and recollects all about the matter, and also remembers that there was an unusually strong stream against them all the way—likewise a stiff wind.

“About thirty-four miles, I suppose, it must have been,” adds the first speaker, reaching down another cushion to put under his head.

“No—no; don’t exaggerate, Tom,” murmurs Jack, reprovingly; “thirty-three at the outside.”

And Jack and Tom, quite exhausted by this conversational effort, drop off to sleep once more.And the two simple-minded youngsters at the sculls feel quite proud of being allowed to row such wonderful oarsmen as Jack and Tom, and strain away harder than ever.

When I was a young man, I used to listen to these tales from my elders, and take them in, and swallow them, and digest every word of them, and then come up for more; but the new generation do not seem to have the simple faith of the old times.We—George, Harris, and myself—took a “raw ’un” up with us once last season, and we plied him with the customary stretchers about the wonderful things we had done all the way up.

We gave him all the regular ones—the time-honoured lies that have done duty up the river with every boating-man for years past—and added seven entirely original ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which had actually happened in a modified degree some years ago to friends of ours—a story that a mere child could have believed without injuring itself, much.

And that young man mocked at them all, and wanted us to repeat the feats then and there, and to bet us ten to one that we didn’t.

We got to chatting about our rowing experiences this morning, and to recounting stories of our first efforts in the art of oarsmanship.My own earliest boating recollection is of five of us contributing threepence each and taking out a curiously constructed craft on the Regent’s Park lake, drying ourselves subsequently, in the park-keeper’s lodge.

After that, having acquired a taste for the water, I did a good deal of rafting in various suburban brickfields—an exercise providing more interest and excitement than might be imagined, especially when you are in the middle of the pond and the proprietor of the materials of which the raft is constructed suddenly appears on the bank, with a big stick in his hand.

Your first sensation on seeing this gentleman is that, somehow or other, you don’t feel equal to company and conversation, and that, if you could do so without appearing rude, you would rather avoid meeting him; and your object is, therefore, to get off on the opposite side of the pond to which he is, and to go home quietly and quickly, pretending not to see him.He, on the contrary is yearning to take you by the hand, and talk to you.

It appears that he knows your father, and is intimately acquainted with yourself, but this does not draw you towards him.He says he’ll teach you to take his boards and make a raft of them; but, seeing that you know how to do this pretty well already, the offer, though doubtless kindly meant, seems a superfluous one on his part, and you are reluctant to put him to any trouble by accepting it.

His anxiety to meet you, however, is proof against all your coolness, and the energetic manner in which he dodges up and down the pond so as to be on the spot to greet you when you land is really quite flattering.

If he be of a stout and short-winded build, you can easily avoid his advances; but, when he is of the youthful and long-legged type, a meeting is inevitable.The interview is, however, extremely brief, most of the conversation being on his part, your remarks being mostly of an exclamatory and mono-syllabic order, and as soon as you can tear yourself away you do so.

I devoted some three months to rafting, and, being then as proficient as there was any need to be at that branch of the art, I determined to go in for rowing proper, and joined one of the Lea boating clubs.

Being out in a boat on the river Lea, especially on Saturday afternoons, soon makes you smart at handling a craft, and spry at escaping being run down by roughs or swamped by barges; and it also affords plenty of opportunity for acquiring the most prompt and graceful method of lying down flat at the bottom of the boat so as to avoid being chucked out into the river by passing tow-lines.

But it does not give you style.It was not till I came to the Thames that I got style.My style of rowing is very much admired now.People say it is so quaint.

George never went near the water until he was sixteen.Then he and eight other gentlemen of about the same age went down in a body to Kew one Saturday, with the idea of hiring a boat there, and pulling to Richmond and back; one of their number, a shock-headed youth, named Joskins, who had once or twice taken out a boat on the Serpentine, told them it was jolly fun, boating!

The tide was running out pretty rapidly when they reached the landing-stage, and there was a stiff breeze blowing across the river, but this did not trouble them at all, and they proceeded to select their boat.

There was an eight-oared racing outrigger drawn up on the stage; that was the one that took their fancy.They said they’d have that one, please.The boatman was away, and only his boy was in charge.The boy tried to damp their ardour for the outrigger, and showed them two or three very comfortable-looking boats of the family-party build, but those would not do at all; the outrigger was the boat they thought they would look best in.

So the boy launched it, and they took off their coats and prepared to take their seats.The boy suggested that George, who, even in those days, was always the heavy man of any party, should be number four.George said he should be happy to be number four, and promptly stepped into bow’s place, and sat down with his back to the stern.They got him into his proper position at last, and then the others followed.

A particularly nervous boy was appointed cox, and the steering principle explained to him by Joskins.Joskins himself took stroke.He told the others that it was simple enough; all they had to do was to follow him.

They said they were ready, and the boy on the landing stage took a boat-hook and shoved him off.

What then followed George is unable to describe in detail.He has a confused recollection of having, immediately on starting, received a violent blow in the small of the back from the butt-end of number five’s scull, at the same time that his own seat seemed to disappear from under him by magic, and leave him sitting on the boards.He also noticed, as a curious circumstance, that number two was at the same instant lying on his back at the bottom of the boat, with his legs in the air, apparently in a fit.

They passed under Kew Bridge, broadside, at the rate of eight miles an hour.Joskins being the only one who was rowing.George, on recovering his seat, tried to help him, but, on dipping his oar into the water, it immediately, to his intense surprise, disappeared under the boat, and nearly took him with it.

And then “cox” threw both rudder lines over-board, and burst into tears.

How they got back George never knew, but it took them just forty minutes.A dense crowd watched the entertainment from Kew Bridge with much interest, and everybody shouted out to them different directions.Three times they managed to get the boat back through the arch, and three times they were carried under it again, and every time “cox” looked up and saw the bridge above him he broke out into renewed sobs.

George said he little thought that afternoon that he should ever come to really like boating.

Harris is more accustomed to sea rowing than to river work, and says that, as an exercise, he prefers it.I don’t.I remember taking a small boat out at Eastbourne last summer: I used to do a good deal of sea rowing years ago, and I thought I should be all right; but I found I had forgotten the art entirely.When one scull was deep down underneath the water, the other would be flourishing wildly about in the air.To get a grip of the water with both at the same time I had to stand up.The parade was crowded with nobility and gentry, and I had to pull past them in this ridiculous fashion.I landed half-way down the beach, and secured the services of an old boatman to take me back.

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour.There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method.It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats.If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him—all those that are going his way.This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson against ambition and uppishness.

Plain practical rowing of the get-the-boat-along order is not a very difficult art to acquire, but it takes a good deal of practice before a man feels comfortable, when rowing past girls.It is the “time” that worries a youngster.“It’s jolly funny,” he says, as for the twentieth time within five minutes he disentangles his sculls from yours; “I can get on all right when I’m by myself!”

To see two novices try to keep time with one another is very amusing.Bow finds it impossible to keep pace with stroke, because stroke rows in such an extraordinary fashion.Stroke is intensely indignant at this, and explains that what he has been endeavouring to do for the last ten minutes is to adapt his method to bow’s limited capacity.Bow, in turn, then becomes insulted, and requests stroke not to trouble his head about him (bow), but to devote his mind to setting a sensible stroke.

“Or, shall I take stroke?” he adds, with the evident idea that that would at once put the whole matter right.

They splash along for another hundred yards with still moderate success, and then the whole secret of their trouble bursts upon stroke like a flash of inspiration.

“I tell you what it is: you’ve got my sculls,” he cries, turning to bow; “pass yours over.”

“Well, do you know, I’ve been wondering how it was I couldn’t get on with these,” answers bow, quite brightening up, and most willingly assisting in the exchange.“Now we shall be all right.”

But they are not—not even then.Stroke has to stretch his arms nearly out of their sockets to reach his sculls now; while bow’s pair, at each recovery, hit him a violent blow in the chest.So they change back again, and come to the conclusion that the man has given them the wrong set altogether; and over their mutual abuse of this man they become quite friendly and sympathetic.

George said he had often longed to take to punting for a change.Punting is not as easy as it looks.As in rowing, you soon learn how to get along and handle the craft, but it takes long practice before you can do this with dignity and without getting the water all up your sleeve.

One young man I knew had a very sad accident happen to him the first time he went punting.He had been getting on so well that he had grown quite cheeky over the business, and was walking up and down the punt, working his pole with a careless grace that was quite fascinating to watch.Up he would march to the head of the punt, plant his pole, and then run along right to the other end, just like an old punter.Oh!it was grand.

And it would all have gone on being grand if he had not unfortunately, while looking round to enjoy the scenery, taken just one step more than there was any necessity for, and walked off the punt altogether.The pole was firmly fixed in the mud, and he was left clinging to it while the punt drifted away.It was an undignified position for him.A rude boy on the bank immediately yelled out to a lagging chum to “hurry up and see a real monkey on a stick.”

I could not go to his assistance, because, as ill-luck would have it, we had not taken the proper precaution to bring out a spare pole with us.I could only sit and look at him.His expression as the pole slowly sank with him I shall never forget; there was so much thought in it.

I watched him gently let down into the water, and saw him scramble out, sad and wet.I could not help laughing, he looked such a ridiculous figure.I continued to chuckle to myself about it for some time, and then it was suddenly forced in upon me that really I had got very little to laugh at when I came to think of it.Here was I, alone in a punt, without a pole, drifting helplessly down mid-stream—possibly towards a weir.

I began to feel very indignant with my friend for having stepped overboard and gone off in that way.He might, at all events, have left me the pole.

I drifted on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I came in sight of a fishing-punt moored in mid-stream, in which sat two old fishermen.They saw me bearing down upon them, and they called out to me to keep out of their way.

“I can’t,” I shouted back.

“But you don’t try,” they answered.

I explained the matter to them when I got nearer, and they caught me and lent me a pole.The weir was just fifty yards below.I am glad they happened to be there.

The first time I went punting was in company with three other fellows; they were going to show me how to do it.We could not all start together, so I said I would go down first and get out the punt, and then I could potter about and practice a bit until they came.

I could not get a punt out that afternoon, they were all engaged; so I had nothing else to do but to sit down on the bank, watching the river, and waiting for my friends.

I had not been sitting there long before my attention became attracted to a man in a punt who, I noticed with some surprise, wore a jacket and cap exactly like mine.He was evidently a novice at punting, and his performance was most interesting.You never knew what was going to happen when he put the pole in; he evidently did not know himself.Sometimes he shot up stream and sometimes he shot down stream, and at other times he simply spun round and came up the other side of the pole.And with every result he seemed equally surprised and annoyed.

The people about the river began to get quite absorbed in him after a while, and to make bets with one another as to what would be the outcome of his next push.

In the course of time my friends arrived on the opposite bank, and they stopped and watched him too.His back was towards them, and they only saw his jacket and cap.From this they immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was I, their beloved companion, who was making an exhibition of himself, and their delight knew no bounds.They commenced to chaff him unmercifully.

I did not grasp their mistake at first, and I thought, “How rude of them to go on like that, with a perfect stranger, too!”But before I could call out and reprove them, the explanation of the matter occurred to me, and I withdrew behind a tree.

Oh, how they enjoyed themselves, ridiculing that young man!For five good minutes they stood there, shouting ribaldry at him, deriding him, mocking him, jeering at him.They peppered him with stale jokes, they even made a few new ones and threw at him.They hurled at him all the private family jokes belonging to our set, and which must have been perfectly unintelligible to him.And then, unable to stand their brutal jibes any longer, he turned round on them, and they saw his face!

I was glad to notice that they had sufficient decency left in them to look very foolish.They explained to him that they had thought he was some one they knew.They said they hoped he would not deem them capable of so insulting any one except a personal friend of their own.

Of course their having mistaken him for a friend excused it.I remember Harris telling me once of a bathing experience he had at Boulogne.He was swimming about there near the beach, when he felt himself suddenly seized by the neck from behind, and forcibly plunged under water.He struggled violently, but whoever had got hold of him seemed to be a perfect Hercules in strength, and all his efforts to escape were unavailing.He had given up kicking, and was trying to turn his thoughts upon solemn things, when his captor released him.

He regained his feet, and looked round for his would-be murderer.The assassin was standing close by him, laughing heartily, but the moment he caught sight of Harris’s face, as it emerged from the water, he started back and seemed quite concerned.

“I really beg your pardon,” he stammered confusedly, “but I took you for a friend of mine!”

Harris thought it was lucky for him the man had not mistaken him for a relation, or he would probably have been drowned outright.

Sailing is a thing that wants knowledge and practice too—though, as a boy, I did not think so.I had an idea it came natural to a body, like rounders and touch.I knew another boy who held this view likewise, and so, one windy day, we thought we would try the sport.We were stopping down at Yarmouth, and we decided we would go for a trip up the Yare.We hired a sailing boat at the yard by the bridge, and started off.

“It’s rather a rough day,” said the man to us, as we put off: “better take in a reef and luff sharp when you get round the bend.”

We said we would make a point of it, and left him with a cheery “Good-morning,” wondering to ourselves how you “luffed,” and where we were to get a “reef” from, and what we were to do with it when we had got it.

We rowed until we were out of sight of the town, and then, with a wide stretch of water in front of us, and the wind blowing a perfect hurricane across it, we felt that the time had come to commence operations.

Hector—I think that was his name—went on pulling while I unrolled the sail.It seemed a complicated job, but I accomplished it at length, and then came the question, which was the top end?

By a sort of natural instinct, we, of course, eventually decided that the bottom was the top, and set to work to fix it upside-down.But it was a long time before we could get it up, either that way or any other way.The impression on the mind of the sail seemed to be that we were playing at funerals, and that I was the corpse and itself was the winding-sheet.

When it found that this was not the idea, it hit me over the head with the boom, and refused to do anything.

“Wet it,” said Hector; “drop it over and get it wet.”

He said people in ships always wetted the sails before they put them up.So I wetted it; but that only made matters worse than they were before.A dry sail clinging to your legs and wrapping itself round your head is not pleasant, but, when the sail is sopping wet, it becomes quite vexing.

We did get the thing up at last, the two of us together.We fixed it, not exactly upside down—more sideways like—and we tied it up to the mast with the painter, which we cut off for the purpose.

That the boat did not upset I simply state as a fact.Why it did not upset I am unable to offer any reason.I have often thought about the matter since, but I have never succeeded in arriving at any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.

Possibly the result may have been brought about by the natural obstinacy of all things in this world.The boat may possibly have come to the conclusion, judging from a cursory view of our behaviour, that we had come out for a morning’s suicide, and had thereupon determined to disappoint us.That is the only suggestion I can offer.

By clinging like grim death to the gunwale, we just managed to keep inside the boat, but it was exhausting work.Hector said that pirates and other seafaring people generally lashed the rudder to something or other, and hauled in the main top-jib, during severe squalls, and thought we ought to try to do something of the kind; but I was for letting her have her head to the wind.

As my advice was by far the easiest to follow, we ended by adopting it, and contrived to embrace the gunwale and give her her head.

The boat travelled up stream for about a mile at a pace I have never sailed at since, and don’t want to again.Then, at a bend, she heeled over till half her sail was under water.Then she righted herself by a miracle and flew for a long low bank of soft mud.

That mud-bank saved us.The boat ploughed its way into the middle of it and then stuck.Finding that we were once more able to move according to our ideas, instead of being pitched and thrown about like peas in a bladder, we crept forward, and cut down the sail.

We had had enough sailing.We did not want to overdo the thing and get a surfeit of it.We had had a sail—a good all-round exciting, interesting sail—and now we thought we would have a row, just for a change like.

We took the sculls and tried to push the boat off the mud, and, in doing so, we broke one of the sculls.After that we proceeded with great caution, but they were a wretched old pair, and the second one cracked almost easier than the first, and left us helpless.

The mud stretched out for about a hundred yards in front of us, and behind us was the water.The only thing to be done was to sit and wait until someone came by.

It was not the sort of day to attract people out on the river, and it was three hours before a soul came in sight.It was an old fisherman who, with immense difficulty, at last rescued us, and we were towed back in an ignominious fashion to the boat-yard.

What between tipping the man who had brought us home, and paying for the broken sculls, and for having been out four hours and a half, it cost us a pretty considerable number of weeks’ pocket-money, that sail.But we learned experience, and they say that is always cheap at any price.

CHAPTER XVI.

Reading.—We are towed by steam launch.—Irritating behaviour of small boats.—How they get in the way of steam launches.—George and Harris again shirk their work.—Rather a hackneyed story.—Streatley and Goring.

We came in sight of Reading about eleven.The river is dirty and dismal here.One does not linger in the neighbourhood of Reading.The town itself is a famous old place, dating from the dim days of King Ethelred, when the Danes anchored their warships in the Kennet, and started from Reading to ravage all the land of Wessex; and here Ethelred and his brother Alfred fought and defeated them, Ethelred doing the praying and Alfred the fighting.

In later years, Reading seems to have been regarded as a handy place to run down to, when matters were becoming unpleasant in London.Parliament generally rushed off to Reading whenever there was a plague on at Westminster; and, in 1625, the Law followed suit, and all the courts were held at Reading.It must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.

During the Parliamentary struggle, Reading was besieged by the Earl of Essex, and, a quarter of a century later, the Prince of Orange routed King James’s troops there.

Henry I.lies buried at Reading, in the Benedictine abbey founded by him there, the ruins of which may still be seen; and, in this same abbey, great John of Gaunt was married to the Lady Blanche.

At Reading lock we came up with a steam launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley.It is very delightful being towed up by a launch.I prefer it myself to rowing.The run would have been more delightful still, if it had not been for a lot of wretched small boats that were continually getting in the way of our launch, and, to avoid running down which, we had to be continually easing and stopping.It is really most annoying, the manner in which these rowing boats get in the way of one’s launch up the river; something ought to done to stop it.

And they are so confoundedly impertinent, too, over it.You can whistle till you nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry.I would have one or two of them run down now and then, if I had my way, just to teach them all a lesson.

The river becomes very lovely from a little above Reading. The railway rather spoils it near Tilehurst, but from Mapledurham up to Streatley it is glorious. A little above Mapledurham lock you pass Hardwick House, where Charles I. played bowls. The neighbourhood of Pangbourne, where the quaint little Swan Inn stands, must be as familiar to the habitues of the Art Exhibitions as it is to its own inhabitants.

My friends’ launch cast us loose just below the grotto, and then Harris wanted to make out that it was my turn to pull.This seemed to me most unreasonable.It had been arranged in the morning that I should bring the boat up to three miles above Reading.Well, here we were, ten miles above Reading!Surely it was now their turn again.

I could not get either George or Harris to see the matter in its proper light, however; so, to save argument, I took the sculls.I had not been pulling for more than a minute or so, when George noticed something black floating on the water, and we drew up to it.George leant over, as we neared it, and laid hold of it.And then he drew back with a cry, and a blanched face.

It was the dead body of a woman.It lay very lightly on the water, and the face was sweet and calm.It was not a beautiful face; it was too prematurely aged-looking, too thin and drawn, to be that; but it was a gentle, lovable face, in spite of its stamp of pinch and poverty, and upon it was that look of restful peace that comes to the faces of the sick sometimes when at last the pain has left them.

Fortunately for us—we having no desire to be kept hanging about coroners’ courts—some men on the bank had seen the body too, and now took charge of it from us.

We found out the woman’s story afterwards.Of course it was the old, old vulgar tragedy.She had loved and been deceived—or had deceived herself.Anyhow, she had sinned—some of us do now and then—and her family and friends, naturally shocked and indignant, had closed their doors against her.

Left to fight the world alone, with the millstone of her shame around her neck, she had sunk ever lower and lower.For a while she had kept both herself and the child on the twelve shillings a week that twelve hours’ drudgery a day procured her, paying six shillings out of it for the child, and keeping her own body and soul together on the remainder.

Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly.They want to get away from each other when there is only such a very slight bond as that between them; and one day, I suppose, the pain and the dull monotony of it all had stood before her eyes plainer than usual, and the mocking spectre had frightened her.She had made one last appeal to friends, but, against the chill wall of their respectability, the voice of the erring outcast fell unheeded; and then she had gone to see her child—had held it in her arms and kissed it, in a weary, dull sort of way, and without betraying any particular emotion of any kind, and had left it, after putting into its hand a penny box of chocolate she had bought it, and afterwards, with her last few shillings, had taken a ticket and come down to Goring.

It seemed that the bitterest thoughts of her life must have centred about the wooded reaches and the bright green meadows around Goring; but women strangely hug the knife that stabs them, and, perhaps, amidst the gall, there may have mingled also sunny memories of sweetest hours, spent upon those shadowed deeps over which the great trees bend their branches down so low.

She had wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy.And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.

Thus had she sinned in all things—sinned in living and in dying.God help her!and all other sinners, if any more there be.

Goring on the left bank and Streatley on the right are both or either charming places to stay at for a few days.The reaches down to Pangbourne woo one for a sunny sail or for a moonlight row, and the country round about is full of beauty.We had intended to push on to Wallingford that day, but the sweet smiling face of the river here lured us to linger for a while; and so we left our boat at the bridge, and went up into Streatley, and lunched at the “Bull,” much to Montmorency’s satisfaction.

They say that the hills on each ride of the stream here once joined and formed a barrier across what is now the Thames, and that then the river ended there above Goring in one vast lake.I am not in a position either to contradict or affirm this statement.I simply offer it.

It is an ancient place, Streatley, dating back, like most river-side towns and villages, to British and Saxon times.Goring is not nearly so pretty a little spot to stop at as Streatley, if you have your choice; but it is passing fair enough in its way, and is nearer the railway in case you want to slip off without paying your hotel bill.

CHAPTER XVII.

Washing day.—Fish and fishers.—On the art of angling.—A conscientious fly-fisher.—A fishy story.

We stayed two days at Streatley, and got our clothes washed.  We had tried washing them ourselves, in the river, under George’s superintendence, and it had been a failure.  Indeed, it had been more than a failure, because we were worse off after we had washed our clothes than we were before.  Before we had washed them, they had been very, very dirty, it is true; but they were just wearable.    After we had washed them—well, the river between Reading and Henley was much cleaner, after we had washed our clothes in it, than it was before. All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and Henley, we collected, during that wash, and worked it into our clothes.

The washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to herself to charge us just three times the usual prices for that wash.She said it had not been like washing, it had been more in the nature of excavating.

We paid the bill without a murmur.

The neighbourhood of Streatley and Goring is a great fishing centre.There is some excellent fishing to be had here.The river abounds in pike, roach, dace, gudgeon, and eels, just here; and you can sit and fish for them all day.

Some people do.They never catch them.I never knew anybody catch anything, up the Thames, except minnows and dead cats, but that has nothing to do, of course, with fishing!The local fisherman’s guide doesn’t say a word about catching anything.All it says is the place is “a good station for fishing;” and, from what I have seen of the district, I am quite prepared to bear out this statement.

There is no spot in the world where you can get more fishing, or where you can fish for a longer period.Some fishermen come here and fish for a day, and others stop and fish for a month.You can hang on and fish for a year, if you want to: it will be all the same.

The Angler’s Guide to the Thames says that “jack and perch are also to be had about here,” but there the Angler’s Guide is wrong. Jack and perch may be about there. Indeed, I know for a fact that they are. You can see them there in shoals, when you are out for a walk along the banks: they come and stand half out of the water with their mouths open for biscuits. And, if you go for a bathe, they crowd round, and get in your way, and irritate you. But they are not to be “had” by a bit of worm on the end of a hook, nor anything like it—not they!

I am not a good fisherman myself.I devoted a considerable amount of attention to the subject at one time, and was getting on, as I thought, fairly well; but the old hands told me that I should never be any real good at it, and advised me to give it up.They said that I was an extremely neat thrower, and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for the thing, and quite enough constitutional laziness.But they were sure I should never make anything of a fisherman.I had not got sufficient imagination.

They said that as a poet, or a shilling shocker, or a reporter, or anything of that kind, I might be satisfactory, but that, to gain any position as a Thames angler, would require more play of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to possess.

Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that.It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous—almost of pedantic—veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

Anybody can come in and say, “Oh, I caught fifteen dozen perch yesterday evening;” or “Last Monday I landed a gudgeon, weighing eighteen pounds, and measuring three feet from the tip to the tail.”

There is no art, no skill, required for that sort of thing.It shows pluck, but that is all.

No; your accomplished angler would scorn to tell a lie, that way.His method is a study in itself.

He comes in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most comfortable chair, lights his pipe, and commences to puff in silence.He lets the youngsters brag away for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he removes the pipe from his mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out against the bars:

“Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it’s not much good my telling anybody about.”

“Oh!why’s that?”they ask.

“Because I don’t expect anybody would believe me if I did,” replies the old fellow calmly, and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe, and requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch, cold.

There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure of himself to contradict the old gentleman.So he has to go on by himself without any encouragement.

“No,” he continues thoughtfully; “I shouldn’t believe it myself if anybody told it to me, but it’s a fact, for all that.I had been sitting there all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing—except a few dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at the line.I thought it was another little one, and I went to jerk it up.Hang me, if I could move the rod!It took me half-an-hour—half-an-hour, sir!—to land that fish; and every moment I thought the line was going to snap!I reached him at last, and what do you think it was?A sturgeon!a forty pound sturgeon!taken on a line, sir!Yes, you may well look surprised—I’ll have another three of Scotch, landlord, please.”

And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it; and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought about it.

I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the fishermen about there told him; and he said:

“Oh, no; not now, sir.It did used to knock me over a bit at first, but, lor love you!me and the missus we listens to ’em all day now.It’s what you’re used to, you know.It’s what you’re used to.”

I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent.

“When I have caught forty fish,” said he, “then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so on.But I will not lie any more than that, because it is sinful to lie.”

But the twenty-five per cent.plan did not work well at all.He never was able to use it.The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can’t add twenty-five per cent.to three—at least, not in fish.

So he increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third; but that, again, was awkward, when he had only caught one or two; so, to simplify matters, he made up his mind to just double the quantity.

He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew dissatisfied with it.Nobody believed him when he told them that he only doubled, and he, therefore, gained no credit that way whatever, while his moderation put him at a disadvantage among the other anglers.When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two dozen.

So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with.For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish—you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it.Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.

It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in general.Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Angler’s Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago, but some of the older members opposed it.They said they would consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish counted as twenty.

If ever you have an evening to spare, up the river, I should advise you to drop into one of the little village inns, and take a seat in the tap-room.You will be nearly sure to meet one or two old rod-men, sipping their toddy there, and they will tell you enough fishy stories, in half an hour, to give you indigestion for a month.

George and I—I don’t know what had become of Harris; he had gone out and had a shave, early in the afternoon, and had then come back and spent full forty minutes in pipeclaying his shoes, we had not seen him since—George and I, therefore, and the dog, left to ourselves, went for a walk to Wallingford on the second evening, and, coming home, we called in at a little river-side inn, for a rest, and other things.

We went into the parlour and sat down.There was an old fellow there, smoking a long clay pipe, and we naturally began chatting.

He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.

After that it came out, somehow or other, that we were strangers in the neighbourhood, and that we were going away the next morning.

Then a pause ensued in the conversation, during which our eyes wandered round the room.They finally rested upon a dusty old glass-case, fixed very high up above the chimney-piece, and containing a trout.It rather fascinated me, that trout; it was such a monstrous fish.In fact, at first glance, I thought it was a cod.

“Ah!”said the old gentleman, following the direction of my gaze, “fine fellow that, ain’t he?”

“Quite uncommon,” I murmured; and George asked the old man how much he thought it weighed.

“Eighteen pounds six ounces,” said our friend, rising and taking down his coat.“Yes,” he continued, “it wur sixteen year ago, come the third o’ next month, that I landed him.I caught him just below the bridge with a minnow.They told me he wur in the river, and I said I’d have him, and so I did.You don’t see many fish that size about here now, I’m thinking.Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”

And out he went, and left us alone.

We could not take our eyes off the fish after that.It really was a remarkably fine fish.We were still looking at it, when the local carrier, who had just stopped at the inn, came to the door of the room with a pot of beer in his hand, and he also looked at the fish.

“Good-sized trout, that,” said George, turning round to him.

“Ah!you may well say that, sir,” replied the man; and then, after a pull at his beer, he added, “Maybe you wasn’t here, sir, when that fish was caught?”

“No,” we told him.We were strangers in the neighbourhood.

“Ah!”said the carrier, “then, of course, how should you?It was nearly five years ago that I caught that trout.”

“Oh!was it you who caught it, then?”said I.

“Yes, sir,” replied the genial old fellow.“I caught him just below the lock—leastways, what was the lock then—one Friday afternoon; and the remarkable thing about it is that I caught him with a fly.I’d gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that whopper on the end of my line, blest if it didn’t quite take me aback.Well, you see, he weighed twenty-six pound.Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”

Five minutes afterwards, a third man came in, and described how he had caught it early one morning, with bleak; and then he left, and a stolid, solemn-looking, middle-aged individual came in, and sat down over by the window.

None of us spoke for a while; but, at length, George turned to the new comer, and said:

“I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we—perfect strangers in the neighbourhood—are taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much obliged if you would tell us how you caught that trout up there.”

“Why, who told you I caught that trout!”was the surprised query.

We said that nobody had told us so, but somehow or other we felt instinctively that it was he who had done it.

“Well, it’s a most remarkable thing—most remarkable,” answered the stolid stranger, laughing; “because, as a matter of fact, you are quite right.I did catch it.But fancy your guessing it like that.Dear me, it’s really a most remarkable thing.”

And then he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an hour to land it, and how it had broken his rod.He said he had weighed it carefully when he reached home, and it had turned the scale at thirty-four pounds.

He went in his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came in to us.We told him the various histories we had heard about his trout, and he was immensely amused, and we all laughed very heartily.

“Fancy Jim Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old Billy Maunders all telling you that they had caught it. Ha! ha! ha! Well, that is good,” said the honest old fellow, laughing heartily. “Yes, they are the sort to give it me, to put up in my parlour, if they had caught it, they are! Ha! ha! ha!”

And then he told us the real history of the fish.It seemed that he had caught it himself, years ago, when he was quite a lad; not by any art or skill, but by that unaccountable luck that appears to always wait upon a boy when he plays the wag from school, and goes out fishing on a sunny afternoon, with a bit of string tied on to the end of a tree.

He said that bringing home that trout had saved him from a whacking, and that even his school-master had said it was worth the rule-of-three and practice put together.

He was called out of the room at this point, and George and I again turned our gaze upon the fish.

It really was a most astonishing trout.The more we looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.

It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.

And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.

“You haven’t injured the fish, have you?”I cried in alarm, rushing up.

“I hope not,” said George, rising cautiously and looking about.

But he had.That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments—I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred.I did not count them.

We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little pieces like that.

And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but it was not.

That trout was plaster-of-Paris.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Locks.—George and I are photographed.—Wallingford.—Dorchester.—Abingdon.—A family man.—A good spot for drowning.—A difficult bit of water.—Demoralizing effect of river air.

We left Streatley early the next morning, and pulled up to Culham, and slept under the canvas, in the backwater there.

The river is not extraordinarily interesting between Streatley and Wallingford.From Cleve you get a stretch of six and a half miles without a lock.I believe this is the longest uninterrupted stretch anywhere above Teddington, and the Oxford Club make use of it for their trial eights.

But however satisfactory this absence of locks may be to rowing-men, it is to be regretted by the mere pleasure-seeker.

For myself, I am fond of locks.They pleasantly break the monotony of the pull.I like sitting in the boat and slowly rising out of the cool depths up into new reaches and fresh views; or sinking down, as it were, out of the world, and then waiting, while the gloomy gates creak, and the narrow strip of day-light between them widens till the fair smiling river lies full before you, and you push your little boat out from its brief prison on to the welcoming waters once again.

They are picturesque little spots, these locks. The stout old lock-keeper, or his cheerful-looking wife, or bright-eyed daughter, are pleasant folk to have a passing chat with. [287]  You meet other boats there, and river gossip is exchanged.  The Thames would not be the fairyland it is without its flower-decked locks.

Talking of locks reminds me of an accident George and I very nearly had one summer’s morning at Hampton Court.

It was a glorious day, and the lock was crowded; and, as is a common practice up the river, a speculative photographer was taking a picture of us all as we lay upon the rising waters.

I did not catch what was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful attitude, and try to hide his feet.

My first idea was that he had suddenly caught sight of some girl he knew, and I looked about to see who it was.Everybody in the lock seemed to have been suddenly struck wooden.They were all standing or sitting about in the most quaint and curious attitudes I have ever seen off a Japanese fan.All the girls were smiling.Oh, they did look so sweet!And all the fellows were frowning, and looking stern and noble.

And then, at last, the truth flashed across me, and I wondered if I should be in time.Ours was the first boat, and it would be unkind of me to spoil the man’s picture, I thought.

So I faced round quickly, and took up a position in the prow, where I leant with careless grace upon the hitcher, in an attitude suggestive of agility and strength.I arranged my hair with a curl over the forehead, and threw an air of tender wistfulness into my expression, mingled with a touch of cynicism, which I am told suits me.

As we stood, waiting for the eventful moment, I heard someone behind call out:

“Hi!look at your nose.”

I could not turn round to see what was the matter, and whose nose it was that was to be looked at.I stole a side-glance at George’s nose!It was all right—at all events, there was nothing wrong with it that could be altered.I squinted down at my own, and that seemed all that could be expected also.

“Look at your nose, you stupid ass!”came the same voice again, louder.

And then another voice cried:

“Push your nose out, can’t you, you—you two with the dog!”

Neither George nor I dared to turn round.The man’s hand was on the cap, and the picture might be taken any moment.Was it us they were calling to?What was the matter with our noses?Why were they to be pushed out!

But now the whole lock started yelling, and a stentorian voice from the back shouted:

“Look at your boat, sir; you in the red and black caps.It’s your two corpses that will get taken in that photo, if you ain’t quick.”

We looked then, and saw that the nose of our boat had got fixed under the woodwork of the lock, while the in-coming water was rising all around it, and tilting it up.In another moment we should be over.Quick as thought, we each seized an oar, and a vigorous blow against the side of the lock with the butt-ends released the boat, and sent us sprawling on our backs.

We did not come out well in that photograph, George and I.Of course, as was to be expected, our luck ordained it, that the man should set his wretched machine in motion at the precise moment that we were both lying on our backs with a wild expression of “Where am I?and what is it?”on our faces, and our four feet waving madly in the air.

Our feet were undoubtedly the leading article in that photograph.Indeed, very little else was to be seen.They filled up the foreground entirely.Behind them, you caught glimpses of the other boats, and bits of the surrounding scenery; but everything and everybody else in the lock looked so utterly insignificant and paltry compared with our feet, that all the other people felt quite ashamed of themselves, and refused to subscribe to the picture.

The owner of one steam launch, who had bespoke six copies, rescinded the order on seeing the negative.He said he would take them if anybody could show him his launch, but nobody could.It was somewhere behind George’s right foot.

There was a good deal of unpleasantness over the business.The photographer thought we ought to take a dozen copies each, seeing that the photo was about nine-tenths us, but we declined.We said we had no objection to being photo’d full-length, but we preferred being taken the right way up.

Wallingford, six miles above Streatley, is a very ancient town, and has been an active centre for the making of English history.It was a rude, mud-built town in the time of the Britons, who squatted there, until the Roman legions evicted them; and replaced their clay-baked walls by mighty fortifications, the trace of which Time has not yet succeeded in sweeping away, so well those old-world masons knew how to build.

But Time, though he halted at Roman walls, soon crumbled Romans to dust; and on the ground, in later years, fought savage Saxons and huge Danes, until the Normans came.

It was a walled and fortified town up to the time of the Parliamentary War, when it suffered a long and bitter siege from Fairfax.It fell at last, and then the walls were razed.

From Wallingford up to Dorchester the neighbourhood of the river grows more hilly, varied, and picturesque.Dorchester stands half a mile from the river.It can be reached by paddling up the Thame, if you have a small boat; but the best way is to leave the river at Day’s Lock, and take a walk across the fields.Dorchester is a delightfully peaceful old place, nestling in stillness and silence and drowsiness.

Dorchester, like Wallingford, was a city in ancient British times; it was then called Caer Doren, “the city on the water.”In more recent times the Romans formed a great camp here, the fortifications surrounding which now seem like low, even hills.In Saxon days it was the capital of Wessex.It is very old, and it was very strong and great once.Now it sits aside from the stirring world, and nods and dreams.

Round Clifton Hampden, itself a wonderfully pretty village, old-fashioned, peaceful, and dainty with flowers, the river scenery is rich and beautiful.If you stay the night on land at Clifton, you cannot do better than put up at the “Barley Mow.”It is, without exception, I should say, the quaintest, most old-world inn up the river.It stands on the right of the bridge, quite away from the village.Its low-pitched gables and thatched roof and latticed windows give it quite a story-book appearance, while inside it is even still more once-upon-a-timeyfied.

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at.The heroine of a modern novel is always “divinely tall,” and she is ever “drawing herself up to her full height.”At the “Barley Mow” she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

It would also be a bad house for a drunken man to put up at.There are too many surprises in the way of unexpected steps down into this room and up into that; and as for getting upstairs to his bedroom, or ever finding his bed when he got up, either operation would be an utter impossibility to him.

We were up early the next morning, as we wanted to be in Oxford by the afternoon. It is surprising how early one can get up, when camping out. One does not yearn for “just another five minutes” nearly so much, lying wrapped up in a rug on the boards of a boat, with a Gladstone bag for a pillow, as one does in a featherbed. We had finished breakfast, and were through Clifton Lock by half-past eight.

From Clifton to Culham the river banks are flat, monotonous, and uninteresting, but, after you get through Culhalm Lock—the coldest and deepest lock on the river—the landscape improves.

At Abingdon, the river passes by the streets.Abingdon is a typical country town of the smaller order—quiet, eminently respectable, clean, and desperately dull.It prides itself on being old, but whether it can compare in this respect with Wallingford and Dorchester seems doubtful.A famous abbey stood here once, and within what is left of its sanctified walls they brew bitter ale nowadays.

In St.Nicholas Church, at Abingdon, there is a monument to John Blackwall and his wife Jane, who both, after leading a happy married life, died on the very same day, August 21, 1625; and in St.Helen’s Church, it is recorded that W.Lee, who died in 1637, “had in his lifetime issue from his loins two hundred lacking but three.”If you work this out you will find that Mr. W.Lee’s family numbered one hundred and ninety-seven.Mr. W.Lee—five times Mayor of Abingdon—was, no doubt, a benefactor to his generation, but I hope there are not many of his kind about in this overcrowded nineteenth century.

From Abingdon to Nuneham Courteney is a lovely stretch.Nuneham Park is well worth a visit.It can be viewed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.The house contains a fine collection of pictures and curiosities, and the grounds are very beautiful.

The pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in. The undercurrent is terribly strong, and if you once get down into it you are all right. An obelisk marks the spot where two men have already been drowned, while bathing there; and the steps of the obelisk are generally used as a diving-board by young men now who wish to see if the place really is dangerous.

Iffley Lock and Mill, a mile before you reach Oxford, is a favourite subject with the river-loving brethren of the brush.The real article, however, is rather disappointing, after the pictures.Few things, I have noticed, come quite up to the pictures of them, in this world.

We passed through Iffley Lock at about half-past twelve, and then, having tidied up the boat and made all ready for landing, we set to work on our last mile.

Between Iffley and Oxford is the most difficult bit of the river I know.You want to be born on that bit of water, to understand it.I have been over it a fairish number of times, but I have never been able to get the hang of it.The man who could row a straight course from Oxford to Iffley ought to be able to live comfortably, under one roof, with his wife, his mother-in-law, his elder sister, and the old servant who was in the family when he was a baby.

First the current drives you on to the right bank, and then on to the left, then it takes you out into the middle, turns you round three times, and carries you up stream again, and always ends by trying to smash you up against a college barge.

Of course, as a consequence of this, we got in the way of a good many other boats, during the mile, and they in ours, and, of course, as a consequence of that, a good deal of bad language occurred.

I don’t know why it should be, but everybody is always so exceptionally irritable on the river.Little mishaps, that you would hardly notice on dry land, drive you nearly frantic with rage, when they occur on the water.When Harris or George makes an ass of himself on dry land, I smile indulgently; when they behave in a chuckle-head way on the river, I use the most blood-curdling language to them.When another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to take an oar and kill all the people in it.

The mildest tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in a boat.I did a little boating once with a young lady.She was naturally of the sweetest and gentlest disposition imaginable, but on the river it was quite awful to hear her.

“Oh, drat the man!”she would exclaim, when some unfortunate sculler would get in her way; “why don’t he look where he’s going?”

And, “Oh, bother the silly old thing!”she would say indignantly, when the sail would not go up properly.And she would catch hold of it, and shake it quite brutally.

Yet, as I have said, when on shore she was kind-hearted and amiable enough.

The air of the river has a demoralising effect upon one’s temper, and this it is, I suppose, which causes even barge men to be sometimes rude to one another, and to use language which, no doubt, in their calmer moments they regret.

CHAPTER XIX.

Oxford.—Montmorency’s idea of Heaven.—The hired up-river boat, its beauties and advantages.—The “Pride of the Thames.”—The weather changes.—The river under different aspects.—Not a cheerful evening.—Yearnings for the unattainable.—The cheery chat goes round.—George performs upon the banjo.—A mournful melody.—Another wet day.—Flight.—A little supper and a toast.

We spent two very pleasant days at Oxford.There are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford.Montmorency had eleven fights on the first day, and fourteen on the second, and evidently thought he had got to heaven.

Among folk too constitutionally weak, or too constitutionally lazy, whichever it may be, to relish up-stream work, it is a common practice to get a boat at Oxford, and row down.For the energetic, however, the up-stream journey is certainly to be preferred.It does not seem good to be always going with the current.There is more satisfaction in squaring one’s back, and fighting against it, and winning one’s way forward in spite of it—at least, so I feel, when Harris and George are sculling and I am steering.

To those who do contemplate making Oxford their starting-place, I would say, take your own boat—unless, of course, you can take someone else’s without any possible danger of being found out.The boats that, as a rule, are let for hire on the Thames above Marlow, are very good boats.They are fairly water-tight; and so long as they are handled with care, they rarely come to pieces, or sink.There are places in them to sit down on, and they are complete with all the necessary arrangements—or nearly all—to enable you to row them and steer them.

But they are not ornamental.The boat you hire up the river above Marlow is not the sort of boat in which you can flash about and give yourself airs.The hired up-river boat very soon puts a stop to any nonsense of that sort on the part of its occupants.That is its chief—one may say, its only recommendation.

The man in the hired up-river boat is modest and retiring.He likes to keep on the shady side, underneath the trees, and to do most of his travelling early in the morning or late at night, when there are not many people about on the river to look at him.

When the man in the hired up-river boat sees anyone he knows, he gets out on to the bank, and hides behind a tree.

I was one of a party who hired an up-river boat one summer, for a few days’ trip.We had none of us ever seen the hired up-river boat before; and we did not know what it was when we did see it.

We had written for a boat—a double sculling skiff; and when we went down with our bags to the yard, and gave our names, the man said:

“Oh, yes; you’re the party that wrote for a double sculling skiff. It’s all right. Jim, fetch round The Pride of the Thames.”

The boy went, and re-appeared five minutes afterwards, struggling with an antediluvian chunk of wood, that looked as though it had been recently dug out of somewhere, and dug out carelessly, so as to have been unnecessarily damaged in the process.

My own idea, on first catching sight of the object, was that it was a Roman relic of some sort,—relic of what I do not know, possibly of a coffin.

The neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my surmise seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must have belonged to the preglacial period.

To settle the dispute, we appealed to the boy.We told him not to be afraid, but to speak the plain truth: Was it the fossil of a pre-Adamite whale, or was it an early Roman coffin?

The boy said it was The Pride of the Thames

We thought this a very humorous answer on the part of the boy at first, and somebody gave him twopence as a reward for his ready wit; but when he persisted in keeping up the joke, as we thought, too long, we got vexed with him.

“Come, come, my lad!”said our captain sharply, “don’t let us have any nonsense.You take your mother’s washing-tub home again, and bring us a boat.”

The boat-builder himself came up then, and assured us, on his word, as a practical man, that the thing really was a boat—was, in fact, the boat, the “double sculling skiff” selected to take us on our trip down the river.

We grumbled a good deal. We thought he might, at least, have had it whitewashed or tarred—had something done to it to distinguish it from a bit of a wreck; but he could not see any fault in it.

He even seemed offended at our remarks.He said he had picked us out the best boat in all his stock, and he thought we might have been more grateful.

He said it, The Pride of the Thames, had been in use, just as it now stood (or rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years, to his knowledge, and nobody had complained of it before, and he did not see why we should be the first to begin.

We argued no more.

We fastened the so-called boat together with some pieces of string, got a bit of wall-paper and pasted over the shabbier places, said our prayers, and stepped on board.

They charged us thirty-five shillings for the loan of the remnant for six days; and we could have bought the thing out-and-out for four-and-sixpence at any sale of drift-wood round the coast.

The weather changed on the third day,—Oh!I am talking about our present trip now,—and we started from Oxford upon our homeward journey in the midst of a steady drizzle.

The river—with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory—is a golden fairy stream.

But the river—chill and weary, with the ceaseless rain-drops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with a sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber; while the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin; silent ghosts with eyes reproachful, like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected—is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.

Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature.Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her.It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us.She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.

We rowed on all that day through the rain, and very melancholy work it was.We pretended, at first, that we enjoyed it.We said it was a change, and that we liked to see the river under all its different aspects.We said we could not expect to have it all sunshine, nor should we wish it.We told each other that Nature was beautiful, even in her tears.

Indeed, Harris and I were quite enthusiastic about the business, for the first few hours.And we sang a song about a gipsy’s life, and how delightful a gipsy’s existence was!—free to storm and sunshine, and to every wind that blew!—and how he enjoyed the rain, and what a lot of good it did him; and how he laughed at people who didn’t like it.

George took the fun more soberly, and stuck to the umbrella.

We hoisted the cover before we had lunch, and kept it up all the afternoon, just leaving a little space in the bow, from which one of us could paddle and keep a look-out.In this way we made nine miles, and pulled up for the night a little below Day’s Lock.

I cannot honestly say that we had a merry evening.The rain poured down with quiet persistency.Everything in the boat was damp and clammy.Supper was not a success.Cold veal pie, when you don’t feel hungry, is apt to cloy.I felt I wanted whitebait and a cutlet; Harris babbled of soles and white-sauce, and passed the remains of his pie to Montmorency, who declined it, and, apparently insulted by the offer, went and sat over at the other end of the boat by himself.

George requested that we would not talk about these things, at all events until he had finished his cold boiled beef without mustard.

We played penny nap after supper.We played for about an hour and a half, by the end of which time George had won fourpence—George always is lucky at cards—and Harris and I had lost exactly twopence each.

We thought we would give up gambling then.As Harris said, it breeds an unhealthy excitement when carried too far.George offered to go on and give us our revenge; but Harris and I decided not to battle any further against Fate.

After that, we mixed ourselves some toddy, and sat round and talked.George told us about a man he had known, who had come up the river two years ago and who had slept out in a damp boat on just such another night as that was, and it had given him rheumatic fever, and nothing was able to save him, and he had died in great agony ten days afterwards.George said he was quite a young man, and was engaged to be married.He said it was one of the saddest things he had ever known.

And that put Harris in mind of a friend of his, who had been in the Volunteers, and who had slept out under canvas one wet night down at Aldershot, “on just such another night as this,” said Harris; and he had woke up in the morning a cripple for life.Harris said he would introduce us both to the man when we got back to town; it would make our hearts bleed to see him.

This naturally led to some pleasant chat about sciatica, fevers, chills, lung diseases, and bronchitis; and Harris said how very awkward it would be if one of us were taken seriously ill in the night, seeing how far away we were from a doctor.

There seemed to be a desire for something frolicksome to follow upon this conversation, and in a weak moment I suggested that George should get out his banjo, and see if he could not give us a comic song.

I will say for George that he did not want any pressing.There was no nonsense about having left his music at home, or anything of that sort.He at once fished out his instrument, and commenced to play “Two Lovely Black Eyes.”

I had always regarded “Two Lovely Black Eyes” as rather a commonplace tune until that evening.The rich vein of sadness that George extracted from it quite surprised me.

The desire that grew upon Harris and myself, as the mournful strains progressed, was to fall upon each other’s necks and weep; but by great effort we kept back the rising tears, and listened to the wild yearnful melody in silence.

When the chorus came we even made a desperate effort to be merry.We re-filled our glasses and joined in; Harris, in a voice trembling with emotion, leading, and George and I following a few words behind:

      “Two lovely black eyes;
      Oh!       what a surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong,
      Two—”

There we broke down.The unutterable pathos of George’s accompaniment to that “two” we were, in our then state of depression, unable to bear.Harris sobbed like a little child, and the dog howled till I thought his heart or his jaw must surely break.

George wanted to go on with another verse.He thought that when he had got a little more into the tune, and could throw more “abandon,” as it were, into the rendering, it might not seem so sad.The feeling of the majority, however, was opposed to the experiment.

There being nothing else to do, we went to bed—that is, we undressed ourselves, and tossed about at the bottom of the boat for some three or four hours.After which, we managed to get some fitful slumber until five a.m., when we all got up and had breakfast.

The second day was exactly like the first.The rain continued to pour down, and we sat, wrapped up in our mackintoshes, underneath the canvas, and drifted slowly down.

One of us—I forget which one now, but I rather think it was myself—made a few feeble attempts during the course of the morning to work up the old gipsy foolishness about being children of Nature and enjoying the wet; but it did not go down well at all.That—

“I care not for the rain, not I!”

was so painfully evident, as expressing the sentiments of each of us, that to sing it seemed unnecessary.

On one point we were all agreed, and that was that, come what might, we would go through with this job to the bitter end.We had come out for a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, and a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river we meant to have.If it killed us!well, that would be a sad thing for our friends and relations, but it could not be helped.We felt that to give in to the weather in a climate such as ours would be a most disastrous precedent.

“It’s only two days more,” said Harris, “and we are young and strong.We may get over it all right, after all.”

At about four o’clock we began to discuss our arrangements for the evening.We were a little past Goring then, and we decided to paddle on to Pangbourne, and put up there for the night.

“Another jolly evening!”murmured George.

We sat and mused on the prospect.We should be in at Pangbourne by five.We should finish dinner at, say, half-past six.After that we could walk about the village in the pouring rain until bed-time; or we could sit in a dimly-lit bar-parlour and read the almanac.

“Why, the Alhambra would be almost more lively,” said Harris, venturing his head outside the cover for a moment and taking a survey of the sky.

“With a little supper at the --- [311] to follow,” I added, half unconsciously.

“Yes it’s almost a pity we’ve made up our minds to stick to this boat,” answered Harris; and then there was silence for a while.

“If we hadn’t made up our minds to contract our certain deaths in this bally old coffin,” observed George, casting a glance of intense malevolence over the boat, “it might be worth while to mention that there’s a train leaves Pangbourne, I know, soon after five, which would just land us in town in comfortable time to get a chop, and then go on to the place you mentioned afterwards.”

Nobody spoke.We looked at one another, and each one seemed to see his own mean and guilty thoughts reflected in the faces of the others.In silence, we dragged out and overhauled the Gladstone.We looked up the river and down the river; not a soul was in sight!

Twenty minutes later, three figures, followed by a shamed-looking dog, might have been seen creeping stealthily from the boat-house at the “Swan” towards the railway station, dressed in the following neither neat nor gaudy costume:

Black leather shoes, dirty; suit of boating flannels, very dirty; brown felt hat, much battered; mackintosh, very wet; umbrella.

We had deceived the boatman at Pangbourne.We had not had the face to tell him that we were running away from the rain.We had left the boat, and all it contained, in his charge, with instructions that it was to be ready for us at nine the next morning.If, we said—if anything unforeseen should happen, preventing our return, we would write to him.

We reached Paddington at seven, and drove direct to the restaurant I have before described, where we partook of a light meal, left Montmorency, together with suggestions for a supper to be ready at half-past ten, and then continued our way to Leicester Square.

We attracted a good deal of attention at the Alhambra.On our presenting ourselves at the paybox we were gruffly directed to go round to Castle Street, and were informed that we were half-an-hour behind our time.

We convinced the man, with some difficulty, that we were not “the world-renowned contortionists from the Himalaya Mountains,” and he took our money and let us pass.

Inside we were a still greater success.Our fine bronzed countenances and picturesque clothes were followed round the place with admiring gaze.We were the cynosure of every eye.

It was a proud moment for us all.

We adjourned soon after the first ballet, and wended our way back to the restaurant, where supper was already awaiting us.

I must confess to enjoying that supper.For about ten days we seemed to have been living, more or less, on nothing but cold meat, cake, and bread and jam.It had been a simple, a nutritious diet; but there had been nothing exciting about it, and the odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at the door of our inner man.

We pegged and quaffed away in silence for a while, until the time came when, instead of sitting bolt upright, and grasping the knife and fork firmly, we leant back in our chairs and worked slowly and carelessly—when we stretched out our legs beneath the table, let our napkins fall, unheeded, to the floor, and found time to more critically examine the smoky ceiling than we had hitherto been able to do—when we rested our glasses at arm’s-length upon the table, and felt good, and thoughtful, and forgiving.

Then Harris, who was sitting next the window, drew aside the curtain and looked out upon the street.

It glistened darkly in the wet, the dim lamps flickered with each gust, the rain splashed steadily into the puddles and trickled down the water-spouts into the running gutters.A few soaked wayfarers hurried past, crouching beneath their dripping umbrellas, the women holding up their skirts.

“Well,” said Harris, reaching his hand out for his glass, “we have had a pleasant trip, and my hearty thanks for it to old Father Thames—but I think we did well to chuck it when we did.Here’s to Three Men well out of a Boat!”

And Montmorency, standing on his hind legs, before the window, peering out into the night, gave a short bark of decided concurrence with the toast.