amidst decorous shrubbery, upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests.  Some of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes, and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness which is the English bathing-dress.  In their striped tights on land these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths beneath the bright water.

That is what it looks like.  But a single glimpse into those cool dappled depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals, alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are.  For London does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample traces of that disporting.  We see those traces gleaming and glooming there,—­empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.

A favorite boating-trip is from Teddington up to Oxford, or vice versa, spending a week or two on the way, and stopping at river-side inns at night.  In the season these inns are full to overflowing, and the roughest and smallest of water-side hamlets holds its accommodations at lofty premiums.  A number of public pleasure-steamers and many private steam-launches ply up and down, making the whole trip in two or three days, drawing up at night at towns, and by day provoking curses both loud and deep by the swash of their tidal waves against the liliputian navy.  Many of the merry boating-parties of men and women seek only sleeping-accommodations at the inns, and do their own cooking upon bosky islands, on the wooded or sunny banks of the river, by means of kerosene- or charcoal-stoves and tiny tents.  How appetizingly we have thus smelt the broiling steak and grilled chop done to a turn even in a camp frying-pan, as we tramped along the river heights and looked down upon chatting groups below!  How like airs of Araby the Blest the odors of steaming coffee! how more stimulating than breath of fair Spice Isles the pungent incense of hissing onions!