What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote her fascinating pages, “A Week in a House-Boat”!  We could scarce catch a glimpse of the river upon our tramps—­and it was our constant silvery accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song—­without coming across these ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths below come to bask upon the surface.  Hundreds of them dot the river between Teddington and Oxford:  once we counted ten between Ethel and the wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous hampers upon a huge tree-stump.  Many of them are owned and occupied by artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting river-scenery.  Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or back doors or bedroom windows.  Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but “I want to be a gypsy.”

Some of these house-boats are miracles of microscopic luxury, doll-like bedrooms and dining-rooms for pygmies.  In some, also, marvels of culinary skill are evolved in pocket-space by French chefs who spend their days creating the banquets to which the boaters invite their convives at evening, when the cold river-mists have driven the navy into harbor for the night.  Others are much simpler in construction and furnishing, and the inhabitants live largely upon tinned and potted viands and such light cooking as comes within the possibilities of oil-stoves and fires of fagots on the banks.  Still others—­and we often saw their lordly and corpulent owners reading the “Times” upon the handkerchief space which serves for porch or piazza before their front doors—­move up and down the river from crack hotel to cracker, taking no note of picturesque “bits” or of mooring-places where Paradise seems come down to lodge between Berks and Bucks, caring naught that at this point four exquisite churches and two interesting manor-houses are within tramping-distance, at that a feudal castle and the fairest inland picture that England and nature can offer their lovers, caring only that at the “King” the trout are the best cooked on the whole river, at the “Queen” the chops are divine, while at the “Prince” the perdrix aux truffes are worth mooring there a week for.  These house-boaters are generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,—­and they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,—­exchanging greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or idling up and down the river in the