yourself airs. The hired upriver 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 upriver 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 upriver 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 upriver boat one summer, for a few days’ trip. We had none of us ever seen the hired upriver 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 reappeared 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