luxurious small boats of their river-made friends.  This type of house-boater himself is generally spoken of in brisk naval asides as a “duffer,” the kitchen of his boat is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper, one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where “nothing new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!”

Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements.  The equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or cricket, is Albion’s advantage in this respect over almost all the rest of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime.  Even although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and “Pub” and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the Parks.  All prosperous and proper London—­the amusement is too costly for ’Arry—­seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty land-miles from the metropolis to do so.  Boats are furiously in demand, every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.

One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we spent our summer.  The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there.  It is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier.  Whether or not that hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts than like even swallows on the wing.  The gabled and ivy-wreathed Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands but a few rods from the river’s bank.  Here,