"Right it is," we answered; and with Harris at the sculls and I at the
tiller-lines, and Montmorency, unhappy and deeply suspicious, in the
prow, out we shot on to the waters which, for a fortnight, were to be our
home.
CHAPTER VI.
KINGSTON. - INSTRUCTIVE REMARKS ON EARLY ENGLISH HISTORY. - INSTRUCTIVE
OBSERVATIONS ON CARVED OAK AND LIFE IN GENERAL. - SAD CASE OF STIVVINGS,
JUNIOR. - MUSINGS ON ANTIQUITY. - I FORGET THAT I AM STEERING. -
INTERESTING RESULT. - HAMPTON COURT MAZE. - HARRIS AS A GUIDE.
IT was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to
take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper
green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange,
wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood.
The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water's
edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sunlight, the glinting
river with its drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas
on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at
the sculls, the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors,
all made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and yet so
peaceful, that, early in the day though it was, I felt myself being
dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.
I mused on Kingston, or "Kyningestun," as it was once called in the days
when Saxon "kinges" were crowned there. Great Caesar crossed the river
there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands. Caesar,
like, in later years, Elizabeth, seems to have stopped everywhere: only
he was more respectable than good Queen Bess; he didn't put up at the
public-houses.
She was nuts on public-houses, was England's Virgin Queen. There's
scarcely a pub. of any attractions within ten miles of London that she
does not seem to have looked in at, or stopped at, or slept at, some time
or other. I wonder now, supposing Harris, say, turned over a new leaf,
and became a great and good man, and got to be Prime Minister, and died,
if they would put up signs over the public-houses that he had patronised:
"Harris had a glass of bitter in this house;" "Harris had two of Scotch
cold here in the summer of `88;" "Harris was chucked from here in
December, 1886."
No, there would be too many of them! It would be the houses that he had
never entered that would become famous. "Only house in South London that
Harris never had a drink in!" The people would flock to it to see what
could have been the matter with it.
How poor weak-minded King Edwy must have hated Kyningestun! The
coronation feast had been too much for him. Maybe boar's head stuffed
with sugar-plums did not agree with him (it wouldn't with me, I know),
and he had had enough of sack and mead; so he slipped from the noisy
revel to steal a quiet moonlight hour with his beloved Elgiva.
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