-
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.
