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There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to tell you. There is an engagement you will want to know all about. It came to pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I remember, and shall never forget as long as we live.
B. examined me, and he said oh, he said a good deal about my Latin verses, and the books I'm in, but I can't tell you it, because it seems so muffish. And, papa, I wish I might bring Crayshaw home for the Easter holidays; you very nearly promised I should; but I wanted to tell you what fun I and the other fellows had at the boat-race. You can hardly think how jolly it was.
He could contemplate Euthymia from a distance, as he did on the day of the boat-race, without any nervous disturbance. A certain proximity was necessary for the influence to be felt, as in the case of magnetism and electricity. An atmosphere of danger surrounded every woman he approached during the period when her sex exercises its most powerful attractions.
A drunken drab pulled another drunken, drab off the settle to make room for the "poor young man"; and I sat there with a confused notion that something strange and dreadful had happened to me, while the party drained their respective quarts of porter, and talked over the last boat-race with the Leander.
It is to Sir George and to Sir David Erskine that I am indebted for the greater portion of the details concerning this boat-race of 1866, and of its preliminaries, for many of these would not have come within the scope of my knowledge at nine years of age.
The questionable witticisms might perhaps be attributed to an attempt to relieve the strain, but there is an unusual amount of Homeric imitation, and inartistic allusion to contemporaries which, as in the youthful Bucolics, destroys the dramatic illusion. One is tempted to suspect that the whole narrative of the boat-race is filled with pragmatic allusions.
Ah, my little man, when you are a big man, and fish such a stream as that, you will hardly care, I think, whether she be roaring down in full spate, like coffee covered with scald cream, while the fish are swirling at your fly as an oar-blade swirls in a boat-race, or flashing up the cataract like silver arrows, out of the fiercest of the foam; or whether the fall be dwindled to a single thread, and the shingle below be as white and dusty as a turnpike road, while the salmon huddle together in one dark cloud in the clear amber pool, sleeping away their time till the rain creeps back again off the sea.
In the midst of his relief about the boat-race he could scarcely bring himself to regard seriously the boy's real offence, bad as that had been; and, indeed, it was not until Wyndham himself referred to it that afternoon that its gravity occurred to him. Riddell was waiting there for him, and as the boy approached, his wretched, haggard looks smote the captain's heart with remorse.
Off they went! The French galleys lumbering along at a great pace, their crews pulling a curiously short stroke, and their coxswains yelling "En avant, mes braves!" with all the strength of their lungs. It must have been very like the boat-race Virgil describes in the fifth book of the Aeneid.
And again at the Pequot House at New London on the eve of a varsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of money and taunts at Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded feet and frightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob's cents, at the sum total of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of Yale money and came to with a white face streaming with cold perspiration.
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